Seguin Trade Days and Earth Day Celebration (Part 1 of 2)

Twice a year, Seguin hosts Trade Days at the Central Park. There are lots of vendors selling food, crafts, clothes, furniture and much more. This Trade Day event was paired up with Earth Day celebrations, so there were also booths showing how to recylce, how to go green, how to plant and grow flowers and food, and other recycle and conservation tips. 

Here is a sampling of Trade Days seen through my camera lens….lots of people, some of the booths, and a few of our favorite downtown buildings and icons.

Seguin Art League Celebrates Earth Day

The Seguin Art League joined with the city of Seguin to celebrate Earth Day on Saturday, April 26, 2014 during the Trade Days event.

Members took turns helping man the Art League booth. Local folks who came to Trade Days stopped by the booth to find out more about the Art League and children stopped by to take part in a recycle craft project.

Evamarie Berry greeted folks as they stoppied by the booth.

People who stopped by were surveyed to find out what kind of art classes they might like to attend.

Donna Maske shows children how to make cd suncatchers with yarn.

Patricia Lane also spent some time working with the children.

Roger Betschler, the most decorated of all the helpers, shows off his many ribbons and medals.

John Leithead and Roger discuss weighty and important matters.

Cindy, one of the newest Art League members, took a break and ate a hamburger cooked at one of the nearby booths.

Japanese Tea Gardens For a Nice Day Trip

The Japanese Tea Gardens, located next to the San Antonio Zoo, is a wonderful place to spend a few some time if you enjoy lush, exotic blooms and plants, as well as koi ponds and a cooling waterfall.

The Gardens were built when the city of San Antonio asked a Japanese man named Kimi Elzo Jingu and his wife to transform an old rock quarry into a Japanese-style garden place in 1915.

To enter the Garden, one can walk under a pagoda style entrance-way which bears the inscription, "Entrance to Chinese Garden," a kind of confusing sign, unless you understand the anti-Japanese feelings that pervaded the United States after the destruction of Pearl Harbor and the forth-coming US involvement in WWII.  From the 1940s until 1983, the city changed the name of the Gardens from the Japanese Tea Garden to the Chinese Tea Garden. 

There are many wheel-chair accessible paths, as well as lots and lots of stone steps to take a person from one part of the garden to another.

The main feature of the garden is the massive stone pavilion. There are picnic tables if you would like to enjoy a snack during your visit, where you can sit and look down to the ponds and over to the waterfall.