The festival went all weekend though. Unfortunately, I don't have many photos from it specifically, but I'll try and get some from friends to put up here so everyone can see. There was stuff going on all weekend long, so there was a fair bit of walking downtown from the Residence Lafayette (our dorm). The walk is only about 20 minutes if you keep moving, but whenever we start travelling in a group, we start moving a lot slower.
Starting at around 5 on Friday was "The Ball" according to the information I was given to one of the professors. A group of us headed out from the Lafayette at about 8 so we could wait for some of the students getting out of later classes. We headed downtown to a cafe close to the cathedral where we thought we were going to meet up with other students, but they didn't show up for another 25 minutes and when they did, they were all dressed in their kitschy costumes for the night!
This guy above wasn't with us, but he's a pretty good example of what we started to see around there. When the other students showed up in costume like that, we decided that we definitely needed to get our own, so Thomas, Stefan and I headed over to the tent in the festival square to pay our two euros and leave with all we could wear. Inside were about six racks of old clothes that people had donated, as well as buckets of ties, scarves, belts and that purse.
Everyone had their photos taken by a photographer at the end of the tent so that they could be projected up onto a screen for everyone in the square to judge. If you liked the outfits they were wearing, you were supposed to shout out "Vengeance!" to cheer for them. We all had a fun time cheering for each other, but it seemed like the voting was a little rigged....
After all the costumes and picking the kitschiest of us all, everyone in the square turned to the live bands there for some dancing. There was one rock band that we were all enjoying, and they sung a bit in English, too, though I didn't really recognize the songs. Friday night was rediculously fun. I ended getting back to the dorm around 1:30 and then slept until 2 on Saturday.
Saturday was a lot of fun too. For most of the day was the market that is in town on the weekends. Starting at about 7pm though, there were a few concerts and performances by a number of Celtic and pipe and drum bands before a fireworks show that was fantastic. The French really know how to do fireworks here. At one point there were some type of emitters or fireworks strung across the back of the stage which poured a sheet of fireworks down. I had gotten separated from everyone else somewhere in the massive crowds that were there and when I found a group that was heading back, I just decided to stick with them.
The main event on Sunday was the parade through town. We started off with walking downtown to the train station and bought our train reservations for our trip to Nice next weekend. It seems like half of everyone here at GTL is going to be coming with us, but we're hopefully going to be splitting up a bunch. The train reservations went just fine for me, so I've got a bunk on a sleeper train for next Thursday night! I'm really looking forward to that trip.
Outside the train station was a craft show where a number of artisans came out to display their work. A lot of it seemed like the typical craft show type fair. There was one very interesting watchmaker/watch repair stand that had beautiful work. I didn't even bother trying to figure out how to ask the price though, since it would have been through the roof for me. After we walked through all the stalls and admired their work, we found a little place on the side of the road and waited for the parade to start.
It seemed like there was a general theme to the parade, starting out with very early history and a float that seemed like it had Flintstones characters on it... All the people walking along with it had toga looking things on and necklaces of little plastic bones. Then came along the first pipe band of the group. It wasn't quite the typical Scottish pipe band that I'm used to seeing at the Alexandria Scottish Christmas Walk though, since some of the musicians had an instrument that looked like a clarinet that was fitted with a bagpipe style reed, and there were some of those in pretty much each band that was there, and relatively few of the bands wore kilts too. The rest of the parade was pretty much a float, then a band, then a float and a band.
The floats seemed to generally get more modern too, as we had the medieval(?) lord and dragon float, which was somewhere close to the group of princesses we saw walk by, and we also had the Renaissance players float, which these two walked along next to.
The culminating float was, though the cathedral float with the freshly crowned Queen of the Mirabelle. She won the beauty pageant on Friday night, and got to stand at the front of the final float, strategically placed in front of the two monks. I assume they were there to remind you not to sin :)
From what I remember, there were one or two more pipe bands after that and then it started raining more heavily, so we decided to walk home, by way of the creepy graveyard :)
Hope it's all going well back home!
Looks like great fun! Maybe you should start a festival like this when you return, like the start of Wahoo football festival with kitchy costume and all!
ReplyDeleteAs much fun as that would be, I'm not exactly sure how many other Hoos would enjoy that...
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