Fete De La Musique

Ok, I know its cold and miserable back home, but I guess the good news for you is that the days will start to get longer now. Over here of course, people are a little depressed as now we begin the long slow slide into the deep dark coldness of winter. But there is still a couple of months of summer to go and what better way to celebrate the summer solstice than to have a massive nationwide party.

As far as I can work out every year on the night of the summer solstice, France hold a festival called 'Fete de la Musique' literally, The Festival of Music. I saw some ads for this and I had in my mind the idea that this festival, would involve a whole stack of large stages in parks around town where everyone would go and see some free music. Oh how wrong I was. The festival is sooo much bigger than that, there were bands and music on pretty much every street corner and outside every bar all over the city. On our street alone, there were about 8 or 9 sites where you could go and watch music, and there were people absolutely everywhere, it very difficult to describe just how big it was.

This was the scence on our street at about 10pm, 20m from our front door.


So we grabbed a beer and joined the festivities in our local area. I reckon we wandered around and looked at about 25 different places where music was being played all within about a 1km radius of our house, you name a genre of music and you would find it. From Rap & Hip Hop, Indie, Grunge, Reggee, Rock, Jazz, Classical, Drum & Bass, Electronica, whatever you want you can find it somewhere. There must have been thousands of bands and artists playing all over the city on the night, judging by just the small sample size that we saw.


Sadly it was a Sunday night but that didn't stop us (espeically myself) from having way to much to drink and waking up on Monday morning with quite the hangover.