Le Festival de La Loire

This year was the third Festival, and it happens every other year. I heard that this year it was huge. Supposedly the last one was only during the weekend, and did not have as many shows and booths and such. I also heard that it might have been so big this year because someone is up for reelection...I don't follow local politics so I have no idea if that's true or not. This year it ran from Wednesday the 19th to Sunday the 23rd.

La Loire, as you might remember, is the big river that runs through Orléans, that also happens to be the largest, and about two minutes from my apartment. I'll try to be a little historic here and explain why it's a big deal. In the olden days, meaning I believe the 18th century, the Loire was a hopping place. However the bottom is shallow and rocky in many places, and therefore hard to travel with your average boat. To get around this they made flat-bottomed boats. Me, myself, personally, I don't find the technical reasoning interesting, but they are quite proud to have all these boats here. The part that interested me was everything else. Both sides of the Quai were lined with tents. They went for about..ok I don't know distances. But speed walking probably five minutes without anyone blocking your path. When it's packed and you're looking at everything and everyone... 15 - 20 minutes to walk the length. The tents had different vendors: cheese, meat, jams, crepes, gauffres, fish, cheese, jams. They also had four or five cafes setup, and a pub. A couple of organizations and local artisans also had tents. Then they had a few different stages with performances throughout the festival. I only saw a couple. I caught the end of a drumming group, and we watched a flame thrower for a few minutes. They also had a group of people kind of like Cirque de Soleil. They were on ropes and did acrobatic-like things. People who have seen Cirque will know what I mean. The other group was a musical group. I have no idea what instruments they were playing, but there were two guys. Their instruments stood about as tall as them, and they were electric. They made some of the weirdest music I've ever heard. I was smart enough to take a video, and eventually I'll try to get that up on facebook and photobucket...hopefully.

Unfortunately I didn't get to spend as much time there as I wanted. But I did buy a très bon crepe, and Saturday night we went and saw the 20 minute firework show.

I believe in my last post I was describing the wonderful cold that I had rattraped. That was the main reason I didn't go down to the Loire. Friday night I recuperated slightly and Kay and Dee convinced me I felt well enough to go out. Dee met a Polish guy at school and we went with him to the club. it was fun, bien sur. I realized that French girls dance like it's '92. And Poland could not dance to save his life. I also found out that drinking and staying up do not help a cold...At all...

Saturday I slept a lot, but Kay came up for dinner. Prepare yourselves people. We made an amazing dinner. Fiesta chicken, it was my idea. We made rice and corn, flavored with a little bit of texmex spices. Fried some red pepper and added some to the rice and corn. Then we put the rest with the chicken, which was also spiced. It was, as I said, amazing. It looked great too...I took pictures.

Later that night my friend JP came over for the fireworks. Both Kay and Dee had gotten in tiffs with people over the phone, so they decided we needed to cheer up. We accomplished this with rum, wine and two games of Kings. So Sunday was another recovery day...sleeping...eating...being slow and doing homework.

And that was how I ended Le Festival de la Loire