What is this Fête de la Musique? It's a music festival involving all types of music performed by bands, mostly outdoors, to celebrate the beginning of summer and the longest day of the year.
And in 2010, on Monday, I got to experience la Fête de la Musique in Paris. The capital. This year totally rocked 2006's socks off. While interesting, my experience in 2006 involved listening to various mediocre bands do covers until about 9pm when we headed home.
On Monday, Tom and I didn't start until 10pm (although, this was a mistake because many venues closed down at midnight). We started in the 5th district at la Place de la Contre-Escarpe where, again, we heard covers, the best of which was Born to be Wild. We then took the metro (for the last time) to the 4th, near the Bastille where we listened to Les Dindons Virtuels, a pretty great sounding band doing songs by the Stones, Beatles, and Lynyrd Skynyrd outside Le Paradis du Fruit. Next, we walked to the nearby Place des Vosges. In each corner of this square there was a different band. We stood in the middle to orient ourselves then followed our ears to a band singing, you'll never believe it, French songs! It was very good to hear. Even though I didn't know any of them, I get sick of all the covers in English (especially when they don't actually know all the words). Unfortunately I don't think they were on the official listing and don't know how to find out who they were.
Really bad picture. You can't even see the band. But this was at Place des Vosges.
On the way out, we listened to a few interesting Electro-chorale numbers by a group wearing...rain suits?
Electo-chorale group called Echo.
Our last stop was supposed to be at Le Troisième Lieu, a bar with bands playing until 2am. I thought it would be good to find a place open late where we could sit down. Except when we got there, there was a line and it looked too hip for us. Instead, we went to a nearby bar to listen to music (through the stereo). At about 1:30 I was feeling pretty tired, so we decided to walk to the nearest metro to go home. RATP had announced for a week before that the metro would be running all night. After checking several stations, though, we realized they had deceived us and had decided to screw us all over. Why? I still don't know. Even the night buses, which are a normal thing, weren't normal. RATP, I can't believe I praised you in a recent post. I'm still waiting for an apology.
So we walked. From the 4th to the 13th. It took a little over an hour, and we reached home at 3am. It seemed like a very long walk, especially since I was so tired. But at the same time, I expected it to take longer. It turns out that Paris really isn't that big (excluding the suburbs of course). Our long early morning walk was only a little over 3 miles, or about 5 kilometers. In every other way, Paris is a big city, just not in actual size.
This walk gave Tom a chance to show off, though. Without a map, he got us home without a hitch, and he even showed me some pretty cool hidden treasures I'd never seen. He took a Discovering Paris class, which involved a lot of field trips, and now I'm really jealous because he might know Paris better than me.
Overall, it was a great night. The best part, I think, was experiencing some of my favorite spots (Place des Vosges, Place de la Contre-Escarpe) in new ways.
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