Taste Globally, Picnic Locally

A vacada, or amateur bullfight, kicks off the four-day-long festival season. "It's like the running of the bulls," explains Paul Barcelos, one of the hall's directing officers. Bloodless bullfights, at which the bull is "stabbed" with a Velcro-tipped banderilla, are part of the festival ceremonies. There's a bullfighting ring at the rear of the Community Hall complex.

The hall's several buildings are centered on a large, graceful, Iberian-style courtyard. A public bar and mini-cafe in one of the buildings, is where older Portuguese men come to socialize during the week. Throughout the festival the bar serves Portuguese ports, Portuguese brandy, soft drinks, and snacks that include linguica sandwiches.

The re-enactment of the medieval festa is a ceremony that has lingered in the Azores Islands (the whole village is invited), where most of Artesia's Portuguese are from. This year, the festa - a flurry of dances, processions, cultural rituals, religious observances and the a serving of symbolic foods, all rolled into one event - begins on July 24. Marching bands from various other DES halls come to town. Friday night, a procession of last year's queen and her princesses moves through the streets. Their arrival is followed by serving traditional sweet bread, masa sovada, to everyone present. Next, the older men present the Portuguese equivalent of rap - cantorias, or folk stories, made up on the spot and sung in rhyme for as much as an hour at a time.

Sopes is the meal most Portuguese await with anticipation all year long. It's served on Sunday after Mass, when all the school kids - dressed as queens, princes and princesses - parade from the church to the hall, accompanied by a throng of visiting marching bands. At least 700 people will crowd into the courtyard on Sunday, the third day of the festa. Working in the hall's massive kitchens, volunteers cook vats of specially cured meat, along with hundreds of pounds of cabbage. Broth will be poured over dry bread in huge bowls, then topped with the stewed meat, cabbage and sprigs of fresh mint. The food is served family-style on enormously long paper-covered tables. Folks take their plates to the central courtyard, or eat with 600 other hungry people in the hall. Like me, more and more of them aren't Portuguese at all.

The requisite ingredients for Portuguese-style picnics can be found at Portazil Pastry. Consider linguica, the corpulent, slightly sweet Portuguese sausage (Portazil stocks six different brands), and whole fresh-frozen sardines grilled over live coals and brushed with hot malagueta pepper-infused butter - eat them with potatoes baked in the coals. Other possibilities for al fresco meals include presunto, Portuguese-style cured ham similar to prosciutto; and a good selection of cheeses from the Azores and the mainland for eating with the fresh rolls made right here. The bakery also turns out homemade Portuguese sweet bread and yeast-risen cornbread. Don't pass up the queijavas - fine little pastry cups with such fillings as ground-almond custard, orange custard, caramel and coconut. There's also a great selection of olives and pickled peppers. Open Mon.-Sat. 8 a.m.-6 p.m. 18159 Pioneer Blvd. (at 183rd St.), Artesia; (562) 865-1141.

AFRICAN

Many large cultural celebrations have developed a growing following outside their immediate ethnicity. One such event, the Los Angeles African Marketplace and Cultural Faire, attracts such huge crowds it has expanded to a three-weekend stretch from the two days with which it originally started. The Rancho Cienega Park location (323-734-1164) will, on three weekends, August 22 through September 7, be transformed into an African village, replete with thatched huts to serve as booths for arts and crafts.

The gaiety generated by the boinky trill of West Indian steel drums alternates with music that runs the gamut from Senegalese mbalay to reggae. The crowd is just as mixed as the foods they are sampling: Ghanaian-style jolof "rice and do do," a puffy African-style falafel of ground black-eyed peas, shares the walkabout menu with the hybrid Afro-Caribbean specialties such as conch fritters, jerk pork, collard greens and barbecue.

GREEK

In Greek, the word for visitor, Xenos, doubles as the word for stranger - a revealing clue to the success of Greek hospitality, and possibly why many non-Greeks who frequent their festivals feel so immediately at home. Southern California's large and well-established Greek community puts on many festivals each year, many of them outdoors in parks. "There's a Greek festival circuit," explains Akrevoe Emmanouilides, who is already baking and freezing Greek breads for the St. Katherine's Church Festival in October in Redondo Beach. "Many non-Greeks go from festival to festival," she continues. "They love Greek food and the dancing."

The festivals aren't just stamped-out duplicates of one another. Various locations - St. Anthony's festival at Santa Anita Racetrack, St. Constantine and Helen's at the Antelope Valley Fairgrounds - give a different feel to each. The Long Beach festival, set by a lagoon, reminds many of being on a Greek island. Amplified bazoukia music throbs, backing up exhibition dancers who wear stunningly crafted regional costumes. And Greek dancing lessons coax almost everyone from their seats.

Church members go all out for their festivals, throwing themselves into the food preparation weeks in advance: making dolmas, spanakopitas, gyros, meat and souvlaki. A published yearly schedule lists 19 festivals in Southern California; most events run through an entire weekend. For a calendar, send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to: Greek Festival Schedule, 3608 Country Club Dr., Long Beach, CA 90807-3826.