BEA

BEA,  3-12.5 2013, Bern Expo

As I have spent an approximate 10 months of my life in Calgary, home to the Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth, The Annual Calgary Stampede (which I duly attended for a nauseating full day and heard about for a full nauseating year), visiting the BEA this Sunday felt like a flashback to a place and time when I better understood what people around me were saying and owned way more plaid shirts. Besides these two significant factors the only thing different was the lessened number of slutty cowgirls and the equally lessened number of tribal-tattooed douchebags. Don't take this as if there won't be magnificent stereotypes at the BEA. They've just shifted. 

The BEA was first held in 1951 and has since grown to become the third largest trade fair in Switzerland, nowadays attracting more than 900 sellers and exhibitors to the grounds of the Bern Expo site every Spring. It was established with the purpose of hosting cultural highlights for the entire family, including even a Hausfrauentag and free cinema showings in its first year. The curious concoction of livestock on show, food stalls supplying various greasy goodness, whirlpools or waterbeds on sale, corporate networking, themed displays and zippy amusement park rides that make up the present day BEA is in all its randomness at the heart of the experience. The grounds are enormous and come in many sections, both indoors and outdoors, with the Bern Expo main building housing the absolute largest body of represented businesses of all sizes and purposes. A permanent part of the BEA is the annual exhibit of a Swiss region, Kanton or city (this year it's Bern's time to shine, last year it was Berner Oberland and the year before Emmental), and nostalgia for the national is found throughout the Bernese happening that BEA is. Take a look at this years advertisements for the BEA, which I'm sure you've seen on public transit lately, and you'll see where I'm getting at. 

http://bealea.beapferd.ch

The BEA succeeds in the perplexing task of catering to an incredibly wide, yet narrow audience. The BEA's longstanding affiliations with the agricultural industry guarantees a certain audience, the tivoli vibe pulls in teenagers and the petting zoos entice children of all ages. And the rest? Walking through the entire thing I felt like hiking through the physically embodied version of the internet; the place where pop-up ads / corner stalls will notify you of desires that had never even registered with you before. Unidentifiable artifacts embossed with wolf packs howling at the moon, portable whirlpools or the hottest new vacuum cleaners, things you'd never even thought would exist are all there. It is different and even charming, but the value of the BEA lies not within its selection of oddities. It lies, like for the Calgary Stampede, within the social significance and identity it accommodates for the city of Bern - although not specifically so. 

The BEA in all its strange glory is so specific yet so random that sense is lost on multiple levels. Call it a late Monday night, but my google research did not even reveal what BEA stands for. It is, however a Bernese institution and piece of local history, and if nothing else you would cheat yourself out of a charred Bratwurst, a beer and some sore feet and laughing muscles if you skipped going. But hook up with another foreigner; I'll bet you a candy floss and a wolf pack t-shirt that all your Bernese friends have already been BEA'ed out as kids.