I have just arrived in Amiens, the LAST TOWN on my itinerary. The sun is shining. woohoo. but here is a post i wrote the night of Bastille Day (Bastille Night?) when I didn't have internet at my hotel, copied and pasted for your delight:
July 14, 2007
(I think I will put this on the blog). ((haha that i wrote that in the word document))
It occurred to me today, on Bastille Day, that I have known the Marseillaise for way longer than I knew it was the Marseillaise. I grew up listening to Alan Sherman (the original weird Al), and he has a song about Louis XVI called “You went the wrong way old King Louis,” and it begins to the tune of the Marseillaise. “Louis the XVI was the kiiiing of France in 1789…he was worse than Louis the XV, he was worse than Louis the XIV, he was worse than Louis the XIII…he was the worst, since Louis the first. King Louis was living like a king, and the people were living rotten, but then there was this whole thing called the French revolution that will never be for-gotttt-en….”
In any event, that is to the tune of the Marseillaise if you feel like singing along. This is also probably the reason I’m a nerd, since I grew up listening to things like this. (hi mom and dad! Thanks for making me a nerd, seriously!) I didn’t actually hear the Marseillaise today, though. While the general celebrations I attended (fireworks, carnival, etc) were like the U.S. (except for a few differences to come), they were must less cornily patriotic. I think I saw about one French flag hanging from somebody’s apartment window. Nobody was wearing blue, white and red, flag t-shirts, J’aime la France t-shirts, etc. And no Marseillaise. I kind of wanted to hear it, especially after falling in love with that amazing scene in La Grande Illusion where they sing it. (Conversation in Paris a week ago when the Star Spangled Banner came on in a bar we were in: Rich: I actually really like the Marseillaise. Me: Me too, have you ever seen La Grande Illusion? Rich: That’s my favorite movie.)
Calais actually proved to be an awesome town in which to celebrate 14 juillet, as everyone calls it. This is a serious beach town, so the night time festivities were all on the huge beach. There was a goofy polka band, and all the glace stands were still around serving big cones of deliciousness. The sun doesn’t actually fully set here till about 10:45pm, so the fireworks didn’t start till 11. At 10pm I saw a large crowd of people forming somewhere so I decided to investigate. Turns out the Calais festival committee was giving out glow sticks to the crowd, but then it turned out only to children. Confession: I lied and said I had a small child because they didn’t want to give me one. Oh well. I got my hot pink glow stick! I didn’t really think about the fact that after I swindled it I would look like a huge dork walking around with it because all the other people holding them were indeed small children. But I am a huge dork. So it is ok.
So I got a good seat on one of the walls by the beach, and settled in around 10:15. It was actually ridiculously cold, and the thousands of Calaisois were in winter coats and scarves. I luckily had put on a long sleeved t-shirt so I wasn’t utterly freezing. I was just generally crowd watching, taking pictures of the pretty sunset, and after watching like 20 wheelchairs go by I thought, “wow there are a lot of handicapped people in Calais.” Then I realized I was sitting on the wall of the handicap ramp down to the beach.
At around 10:30 it actually started to get slightly terrifying. There were thousands of people on the beach and dozens of kids who decided to start “les feus d’artifice” (fireworks) early, lighting off fire crackers, sketchy fireworks, loud noises, etc all over the beach. This was actually what I found to be the biggest difference from the U.S. I seemed to be the only person who was freaked out that 7 year old kids were lighting fireworks really haphazardly directly over my head. In the U.S., parents wouldn’t bring their darling children near such a spectacle, would warn them about firework safety, never to play with matches, if you see a person smoking a cigarette run away, etc.. Here, the parents were giving the kids more fireworks and cheering them on, laughing when the fireworks would fire horizontally across the beach landing inches from people. Taking the cue from the rest of the crowd of thousands that was completely okay with this rather dangerous (in my minority opinion) behavior, I chilled out and played with my pink glow stick. I actually could see the fireworks really far in the distance in Dover, and that was cool. (I know it is Dover because dozens of ferries go back and forth there and leave from right next to the Calais beach.) Why there were fireworks in Dover is more of a mystery.
When the fireworks actually began, at 11 on the dot, they were really impressive, and were shot off the pier near the Friterie stand where I had my first lunch of French fries earlier today at the beach. It was actually a complex music and light (the French love their son-et-lumiere) show, and the voiceovers in between the music were hilarious. The theme of the show was “travels around the world” (fitting for me!), and so the fireworks were divided into different “geographical segments.” As a crowd we traveled through the jungles of Africa, the wild west of the United States (to what sounded a lot like Holst’s Mars), South America (to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s Carol of the Bells, which I truly found hilarious. Maybe French people don’t know that this is usually a Christmas song/not related to South America in any significant way that I’m aware of…at least they could have used it for the Russia segment?), each firework segment went along with the funny music. But the final “grand finale” segment was the best. The voiceover was essentially like, “And now that we have traveled all around the world, we must remember that all the people are brothers. And we must protect our brothers. And most of all, we must protect our brother, the planet, and conserve the environment.”
I thought about this while walking back to my hotel (in a HUGE crowd that reminded me of the time when we had to flee some island in Memphis because of the pouring rain, or something…I was young, but I remember a really big crowd leaving fireworks) enshrouded in a gigantic cloud of smoke left over from the fireworks that was just floating through and polluting the air, and then walking past a line of about 100 people in the street, lined up to buy cigarettes from the only Tabac that was open today. Sorry brother planet.
All in all, a really fun relaxing day. I’m happy I decided to take part in the 14 Juillet festivities. Only four more days of Let’s Go left to go. That is really wild. I have definitely really gotten into the groove of this. It is just what I do. I wake up, visit a museum or tourist office or two, eat lunch, visit more museums/internet cafes/Laundromats, pass out on my bed for about an hour, have dinner, briefly check nightlife, write, pass out. But I really realized that I was so used to this job today when I was sitting in a restaurant tonight with really slow service (but really delicious…and I had my first escargot of the trip, and it was actually fantastic, wish I started eating that earlier), and realized I had been sitting alone at my table for nearly 2 hours and was completely non-phased by this at all. Eating alone is actually really relaxing (once you get over the loneliness or awkwardness of it, which I forgot about after a week or two and now don’t even consider.) It is fun to wonder what that couple who has been staring at you for an hour thinks you are doing. Do they think I am a loser who can’t get a date? A liberated feminist who doesn’t need a man to take her to dinner? A reviewer? (d. all of the above? Haha). The past week or so I have been eating pretty expensive multi course dinners (though I’m still keeping under budget.) Once I didn’t have to take day trips anymore, which were the bane of my existence for awhile, that cleared up 10-20 euro a day to spend on making this “toute seule” life a little more luxurious.
Despite the fact that I still have an ocean full of sand covering my scalp after laying on the windy beach today (and this is after a shower, mind you), I am in a fabulous mood. The sun really makes life a lot easier, and fireworks are so pretty!
((note from actual day of posting...i still have some freaking sand in my scalp. several showers later i cannot get rid of it.))
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