This post chronicles my visit to the K-Days festival that went on from July 18 to July 27 2025 at the Edmonton EXPO Centre.
Unlike my corresponding post for the Taste of Edmonton event, which ran concurrently with this one, there’s no real way of dividing these pictures into sections, so I will be just posting them in a more or less chronological order (some pictures got moved around to fit with other related pictures) and talking about them in a flow of consciousness sort of style instead, though I moved up some of the outdoors pictures so most of them are together
I have actually visited K-Days a couple of times in the past, the most recent one (and the only one I have some pictures from) being in 2019, but I haven’t posted a page for those pictures yet. So this is actually the first K-Days article on my blog. I’ll go back someday and add that one too.
Just so I have relevant pages archived in addition to what’s already on archive.org, the event page for K-Days is here (local), the schedule page is here but is a wretched and flawed mess of web development and difficult to capture properly — archive.org here was the best I could do. There was an online map (local) of the event too. The concerts page is here (local) but I didn’t attend any of them. I was kinda tempted to go to the 98 Degrees one though.
I went to the event with Kel on Wednesday, Jul 23 2025, in the afternoon and evening. We had two free tickets from me visiting Jack’s Burger Shack the previous week. There were also a few discount days or “value days” where people with library cards or our ETS Arc Cards could get in for free, listed here (local), but we wanted to avoid those days because we figured they would be busier. And yes, the “Throwback Thursday” picture in the local link was broken — it was broken on the live page as well, one of several broken pictures on the website because their site design is terrible.
There was an onsite brochure as well that I did scan and am posting below.
This page was mostly written on Jul 25 2025.
So here’s a reel of a selected number of the photos I took, along with my flow of consciousness thoughts about each photo.
We arrived at Coliseum LRT Station at about 3:10 pm or so after stopping off at the Taste of Edmonton along the way.
Outside of the LRT station, it was only a few steps to the entrance to the K-Days entrance, but in between the two entrances was this guy sitting on a chair and busking away on a saxophone.
Turning right from him, the entrance to the Edmonton EXPO Centre, and thus K-Days, was right in front of us.
I also took a picture of the ticket stand outside the entrance. This is pretty much the most expensive way to get the single-day adult tickets.
We had to pass a bag scanner to get in, but that was just a gate attendant sticking a stick into my bag and opening it to peek inside and make sure there weren’t any weapons or other illegal goods inside. I actually had the reusable utensils in my bag still, which contained a (plastic) knife among other utensils, but they didn’t find that one, ho ho. No it wasn’t actually one of the items listed as banned on the list.
Once inside, the first thing we did was something that Jon, who had come here earlier in the week, had told us to look out for. There was a Tim Horton’s food truck that was giving away little cups with free 4 ounce drinks. It wasn’t very super obvious that they were free, so not everyone walking by realized it, but the observant or prewarned ones like us got a free drink each.
Kel and I both took pineapple dragonfruit.
We also saw, pasted on the side of that van, a QR code to scan that belonged to an event-wide scavenger hunt. This one:
Over the afternoon and evening, we hunted down these signs and QR codes as an excuse to walk around and see things in almost every corner of K-Days. You basically got 125 points per scan, and scans could be triggered once a day, and in fact it turns out you can even scan photos of the QR codes from home at midnight while testing the system so you can write about it in your blog. Like this sign:
You could then trade in 2,000-5,000 points for things like stickers, apparels, and other things. A lot of the “better” items like clothing were already long out of stock though, so in the end we both collected 4,000 points each, and I got a Pride Fan and a Gold Prospector Sticker, while Kel got a K-Days Bandana that wasn’t even listed on the prize list — she saw it in the binder that the person at the claim booth was flipping through and inquired about it, and walked away with that Secret Item soon after.
The scavenger hunt page (local) was mobile only, to the point that when I tried to open the page on a PC, it looked ugly as sin. You’ll see what I mean if you click on this link for a screenshot of the scavenger hunt locations page (with some elements Adblocked so I could even capture the page without things overlapping), and this link for a screenshot of the prize redemption page.
Anyway sure it could be “cheated”, but a lot of the items are cheap anyway, the better ones were probably all gone by the second day if not the first (before multiple redemptions could even be stacked up), and you’d really just be collecting stickers. I did kind of want all those separate stickers though, but ah well.
The main problem with the scavenger hunt is that you’d see a QR code but they wouldn’t actually be labelled with what the name of the location was, and you’d have to stand there and select a location from the list of 51, then select scan, then scan the QR code and see if it accepted it or not. And a frustrating amount of the time, the website would bug out and not launch my camera at all, and I would have to go back to the previous page and then forwards again to the scan page.
Most of the scan locations were very guessable, but some were not, and what compounded the issue was that some locations were for a hall with more than one entrance, for example, and sometimes there was just one QR code board for the whole area somewhere in the middle, whereas other times there were two identical QR code boards at two separate entrances. And sure the first one scanned fine, but then we’d get to the second one and try to scan it and be confused as to whether it was a repeat of the first one or a new one that we hadn’t figured out yet. Especially since you couldn’t even attempt to re-scan it with a location once you had checked it off the list, so we had no way of checking (besides going to photograph both and staring at them while playing Spot The Difference) if it was a duplicate or not. That part was very frustrating.
Several locations were also missing their QR code. Some of them were on purpose, as they were for events or vendors that were there only for certain limited times of the festival, but others were just plain missing even though the event was still running. For example there was a “Pop-up Market” QR code that was supposed to be there in a “Black Business Edmonton” aisle in one of the halls, and we found that aisle and walked up and down it several times, but it was nowhere to be found.
The most annoying ones though were some participating vendors who had a QR code for their booth, and they put it on a little piece of paper in the middle of their booth so that their overly-extroverted salespeople could chat to anyone coming in to scan and try to sell them their products when they’re obviously just there to scan the QR code. It’s very artificial and dirty. There were other vendors that politely put theirs off to the side of their booth so people could scan it and go, and only engaged with the people who were actually interested in their booth, and that was the better way of doing this. The TELUS booth was the biggest offender of this by far.
Anyway, enough talk about the scavenger hunt after this picture of my spoils. These are basically the “stamp rallies” from Japan and Edmonton could definitely use more of these.
The first exhibit we saw after the free drink was this Canadian Armed Forces display:
Then there was a large food area. Like this truck, which was also at the Taste of Edmonton:
And this whole gallery of photos, which are all various pictures of the outside food area.
Next, here’s a shot of some people breakdancing:
A wrestling ring at the CKUA Radio Stage that we briefly stopped at much later in the evening on the way out of the festival:
And someone carrying a giant cow plushie around. We saw several people carrying huge plushies that they won around the carnival.
I want to carry a huge plushie that I won around the carnival.
The carnival games were expensive though, most games required a $10-30 ante to do anything in. There were things like fishing games, basketball games, hitting balloons with darts, bottles with guns, racing games where you played against another player, knocking blocks off a table with a ball, ring-tossing games, and so on. But all so pricey and far from guaranteed.
Apparently I didn’t take any pictures of these though, with the sole exception of this picture that sort of captures half a shooting game on the right, and a block-knocking game on the left. An unfortunate oversight, probably because we were looking for actual games to try (but ended up not playing any).
There were a lot of rides too. Most of the ones that we saw cost 10 ride tickets, with a couple costing 15. Not sure what the point of those inflated numbers are — why not just make it 2 and 3 tickets? Were there even rides that cost less than 10 tickets but that could not just be reduced to 1 ticket in a system with lower numbers? Like the game stalls, I only took a few photos of this so they’re very non-exhauytive.
There was also a caricatures tent outside, and for $20, I got the artist, Brandon Smith (@brandonsmitharts) to draw a picture of Tigey!
Very cute!
That was most of my outdoor pictures, even though in reality we walked around the outdoors, then the indoors area, then back out again for some time before leaving. Next, here are some indoor pictures from our wanderings around the EXPO Centre. We started in Halls G and H, where a bustling vendor market was going on. I really liked this market, it was probably the second best one that I had visited this year so far, behind only the Butterdome Craft Sale back in early May.
These first two pictures were looking left and right from the first stall in front of us when we walked in:
This is a shot of the Black Business Edmonton aisle:
There was a little canteen area off to the side where Kel picked up some bubble tea from Gong Cha:
And here’s a random shot from the middle of the aisles. There’s a candy place on the near left, a fashion shop selling scrunchies on the near right, a stall with 3-D printed stuff on the middle right, a random Costco tent on the far left, and World of Spas, a fairly large area where hot tubs, of all things, were set up and for sale, on the far right.
There were quite a few other memorable booths too, for example this cribbage store which turned out to be a different one from the one I saw in the Callingwood Night Market two weeks ago. So after never having seen one of these extremely niche stalls ever, I’ve now seen two within a month!
And this hairdresser in the middle of a busy convention hall:
And this Bodymods booth that sold piercing but also undisclosed, yet very obvious, crappy AI art portraits for overinflated prices (their website (local) also lists both piercings and undisclosed AI art):
And some booths were just art exhibits. I loved the Fort Road/Groat Road pictures:
And this build-a-plushie thing:
There was also this store, which I ended up buying an actual plushie from:
There will be a preview further down on the page, and we’ll see the actual plushie as Plushie of the Week this weekend, but it was a very cute horse plushie that only cost $10 and who captured my heart at first sight. I asked the two ladies at the desk to name the horse, so one said Horsie, and the other agreed that it was a good name. But then I asked them to spell it and one said Horsie and the other said Horsey! Eventually though, we settled on Horsie. They also charged me sales tax for the purchase, which I was surprised — vendor markets usually don’t do that. Whatever though, Horsie was worth it.
There were other exhibition halls with other showcases as well. One of the events that was running concurrently was GDX, or Game Developer Exhibition. Well, I guess the website (local) calls it GDX 2025 or “The GDX exhibition”. Literally “The Game Developer Exhibition Exhibition” there…
This GDX 2025 thing was confusing to me though, because prior to the whole K-Days event starting, I had already seen tickets on sale (local) for the event as well, and those tickets were very pricey — they ran $90 and purpotedly gave access to the 2-day conference on Jul 16-17, some networking event on Jul 18, and then a rotating set of exhibitions for the full 10 days of K-Days. Plus “free entry to KDays for the entire event”. This made it seem like the entire event was a thing that ran concurrently with (it was) but separate from (it wasn’t) K-Days, and that you HAD to pay $90 to get access to it.
I found out that that wasn’t the case, and they were just located in one of the exhibition halls connected to other K-Days halls. So we didn’t have to pay $90 each and still walked around the exhibition just fine. That fee was probably mostly for the conference part at the start of K-Days, and just phrased rather badly.
Anyway, what was left of GDX looked like this:
That table above had lots of stickers on it, and I took basically one of each one for uh.. archival purposes. There was also a robot roaming about the place, though I’m not sure if it was linked to GFX, or the Innovation section next to it.
Another event that was running in another hall was the Indigenous Experience in Hall E, this was basically just another vendor market but also had its own food truck and performing stage in there. There was a lot of empty space between aisles and such in this hall.
There were two Discovery Zones in Halls B and C, with booths like this children’s block-building play area in Hall C:
And this First Lego League one:
In Hall B there was a Glow Edmonton display, which was a preview of a Christmas festival in Edmonton (local) that I’ve heard of and almost attended with some friends that I made while doing the MLP program four years ago. But we never ended up going back then, and I hadn’t thought about it since: I made a previous reference to this waaaay back in My Diary #033 though! Perhaps this year?
Anyway they had this big tree staring at us. Kel mentioned that it reminded her of a tree (local) from the Tularean Forest, a zone in Might and Magic VII, which was a game that all three of us siblings played growing up. It kind of does!
They also had festive lights and beautiful mystical garden areas set up — I love mystical gardens:
And a dolled-up princess that was walking around and chatting to people, but I did not get a picture of her.
There was also an Edmonton Transit Service display set up, with a central booth that they were trying to recruit drivers from, a few actual old and new buses parked around the area that people could walk into, and a display of old transit passes, mostly spanning the 90s and 00’s, that I really enjoyed.
Next to this hall was an attraction that I certainly remembered from five years ago — a petting zoo!
And various other animal-related attractions like photo opportunities:
A cow-milking competition area:
And a few stables with horses with really pretty manes:
Meet a slightly out of focus Horsie, my new plushie, and his doppleganger!
Most of the other horses were asleep when we arrived though, so we didn’t take pictures of them.
In the hallway area outside the Halls A-C where these discovery zone areas were set up, there was also a craft and photography contest display area:
By the time Kel and I were done walking through all this, the evening was stretching late and the crowds had noticeably increased. We had been looking for some displays that Jon had seen while we were here and wanted us to visit, including a City of Edmonton one near the petting zoo and a Dairy Farmers of Canada one near the GDX display, but we had seen neither of those so they likely weren’t active on the day that we visited.
We had seen a caricatures booth back in Halls G-H though, and I had wanted to visit them to get more pictures of Tigey done, but it had been packed the previous few times we had walked by it. We figured it would be even worse now that there were more people around, but to our surprise, when we swung by again to get a few more scavenger hunt snapshots in our area to accrue enough points for our prizes, the booth was free! And it was free enough for about 20 minutes or so that I managed to get both the artists there to do portraits of Tigey, one after the other!
Both of those cost $15, and the left one was drawn by Flavio Rojas, who has his back to me in the picture below, and who was also the first artist to want to look at the other caricatures that I had commissioned of Tigey. He recognized Laurel Hawkswell, who drew one of Tigey back in the Paths for People event back on Jun 07, which I thought was cool and showed how interconnected the art scene in Edmonton was. The right picture was drawn by Robert Woodbury (@yegtoon) and he was very nice too and offered me a Ziploc bag to hold the caricature as I was leaving after he saw me trying to fit the two new ones into my own bag. I declined though since I had my own bags at home and just had to get them back there successfully, which I managed to do, but thank you anyway! He’s the one smiling into the camera in the picture below.
Finally, we went out to try to decide on what to have for dinner. It was a little past 8 pm at that point, and though we considered taking the LRT back closer to home for dinner, we figured that Southgate Mall would be closed (9 pm) by the time we reached it. Or at least the food court would be closed. Plus we were at a carnival anyway, so it would have been a bit of a waste to not try some of the food there, expensive though it might have been.
There was a list of “new foods” available at the festival listed on the back of the booklet that I scanned and posted right at the top of this page, and that was cool, but since I hadn’t been here in years anyway and barely ever go to festivals, everything was basically new to me. But on the flip side, a lot of that stuff is stuff I don’t normally eat, and did not consider a meal anyway. Kel had an International Perogies Facebook coupon that her friend had alerted her to, which would have given us 5 additional perogies on one on their orders, but the base order was far too pricey for our taste buds and they seemed to be ordinary perogies from an ordinary food truck and not really carnival food anyway. But most of the more exotic food was also dastardly expensive, like a single giant turkey leg or drumstick for $31.50. $31.50! For one foot-long stick of turkey meat! There were also some Asian-inspired food that we could have done for, but we were trying to avoid “familiar” food like that too, as well as the other “ordinary” food trucks around.
In the end, we decided on some three-meat pizza and curly fries. Kel treated me to this dinner and I went to go sit on a bench and do some people-watching so that we had a place to eat while she went to get the food.
This was actually quite filling and satisfying, while not being some deep fried ice cream level of decadent (though we strongly considered having something like that too).
We left the festival soon after that at just past 9 pm, past the saxophone guy that we had passed by on the way in. He, or someone else with the same instrument, was STILL sitting there when we left K-Days, about five hours later, serenading everyone nearby with soft jazz music that was very fitting of an “end of event” sort of song. Like long, wistful notes. I hope he made a lot of money busking there.