All Fete-ed out

This week has been a busy but fun one. On Wednesday (June 21), we had the yearly Fete de la Musique. All sorts of musical performers are scheduled all over the city in open air free concerts. We saw all sorts of stuff. In the upper right of the pic was our favorite, a guy playing Spanish, Turkish, and Moroccan music in the courtyard of Hotel de Sens. We also saw a cuban band, a classical woodwinds concert, and the odd group in the upper left. Their instruments looked like a bunch of trumpets glued together. We also saw the Gay mens chorus (drowned out by two other choral goups), and a bit of Cesaria Evora. All of this was within a 10 minute walk of our apartement. There were other concerts happening all over France, the news said the next morning that there were over 20,000 concerts in France at Fete de la Musique. It was fun, you really felt like the city was out celebrating summer.

This weekend was also Gay Pride weekend in Paris. Wow. There was a march from Montparnasse to Bastille, and it went a block of our apartment up bd. Henri IV. At the end in Bastille, there was a huge party. They estimated 800,000 people showed up. The theme for the march seemed to be large trucks loaded up with huge speakers blaring out really cool dance music. It was a really fun crowd, a lot of straight people were there to have fun, it's nice to know us queers still throw the best party around. It did have one small problem, it must have been sponsored by a Hearing Aid company. The volume was dangerously high. While we were taking a Cosmo break in the apartment (a block away from the action), our windows were rattling from the noise. The Hearing Aid sponsor now has 800,000 new customers. It was an incredible gathering, I've never seen any GLBT gathering on this scale before.

Sunday we had planned to go to a food festival at Village St. Paul (2 blocks from the apartment, do we live in the right part of town or what?). We woke to a steady rain. We had a very wet trip to the Bastille Sunday morning market, and decided to blow off the food festival.