Good to see you back! Hope you're on the mend. :) Oh, funny that your story instance is from the first Dragon Bash in the old Lion's Arch! Fun coincidence. So, all the festivals in the game usually consist of instanced content of some sort, so they generally don't look like much from the outside. For Dragon Bash, there's arena fighting over by the frozen lake that you enter by talking to the guy at the arena, and a piñata bashing race game (or adventure) along with both an instanced beetle race or the open map race event that you enter through the folks with the adventure icons over their heads. For the moa racing, you bet on the moas, the open map piñatas give you taffy as currency to get event related rewards at all the different vendors. Also, there are hologram bashing events on the open world maps that give loot and work towards the festival meta-achievement reward. Anyway, good to see you back and hope that you get some time to try out some of the festival!

Another video! If you craft while levelling you gain experience . . . .

welcome back. soooo... to answer your question on the plantfood you got from the mystic forge: there is an achievement / a collection to get a "pet plant" which feeds on bloodstone. you can feed it up to 250 bloodstone dust each day and will recieve some container with random junkitems for feeding it. there are also similar items for dragonite ore and empyreal fragments. also: you cant be undergeared or underleveled in pvp in gw2 bc everyone will have the same level and stats in pvp in gw2 (depending on class, specs, and chosen equipment). you will need to set up your gear and build in the pvp hub you went into before starting a pvp game though. regarding crafting: you will get more crafting exp for discovering new recipes than for crafting the same stuff over and over again... also if you want to save some money there are guides for leveling up crafting professions made by the community. last thing from me: what you did was not the dragon bash anual festival, it was part of the story, which coincidently played at the time of dragon bash^^. if you want to take part in the event, there is a beetle racetrack where you can rent a beetle, a pinata adventure, an arena where you can kill some holographic dragon minions and an open world minion bashing event in different maps every 15 minutes. there are also daily achievements for the event and a yearly achievement that will earn you a pretty nice armor skin (check the festival achievements).