Just a quick one...
The night before I left Toulouse for the weekend in Lyon was the summer solstice, celebrated by 'Fete de la Musique' - festival of music. This is a city-wide music festival where all the streets around the centre of town are packed full of any and every sort of music group and they play all night long. I went with Tim, his flatmate Manuelle, and 4 of Manuelle's workmates from Airbus. It was quite a cultural experience!! We saw groups playing jazz, rock, folk, reggae, brass band.... It was like the whole city having a dance party! Quite an amazing community atmosphere that I don't think we'd have in NZ. Perhaps we might have similar things, but not in the same way. The frenchies from Airbus were asking me if we had anything like it in NZ, but I really can't see it happening, and I think it's because Kiwis like their personal space too much. For example, there was a group playing on the corner of an intersection between a main road, a bridge across the Garonne river and another decent-size road. The footpath was small, and the group itself spilled out onto the road. At least 3/4 of the road area was full of people - listening, dancing, kids spraying party sticky stuff and blowing bubbles and falling over...and there were still cars trying to drive through! People just stop randomly, stand on traffic islands or just dead in the middle of the street to listen, and there were so many people you really couldn't move much at all. In NZ if this happened, we wouldn't call it a festival...we'd call it chaos! I thought it was great though. I admired the musicians as well! Later on we came across a brass band from Borgogne of perhaps 20players, who organised themselves around in a cluster to play...with the crowd RIGHT around them and dancing in the middle of the group as well! And they loved it! I'd find it distracting, but it's all part of the culture and city/family feel. It was especially good when they played one of the rugby crowd songs (Toulouse is REALLY into rugby) and the whole crowd started singing along, and then the band stopped playing for a bit and everybody was just singing. I took a few photos, but mostly video clips, which unfortunately I can't upload onto this site. I hope the photos give some idea of what it was like anyway. We left at midnight, having been in town since 8pm, but I don't know how long it would all have gone on for. Maybe even till dawn? It was a real taste of French culture!
Bonne fete!
Lisa
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