Festivals are always a big piece of my summer. Back home in MN, I would have attended some of the Aquatennial goings-on during July. Last weekend I missed only the second Uptown Art Festival in years and years (the first being when we were here in 2006). And I'll be missing the huge State Fair at the end of the month for probably the first time ever since I was a kid.
So I certainly try to partake of them locally when I can wherever I am. This weekend is the finale of the Fêtes de Genève - including the "Pre-Festival", this goes for 3-4 weeks! There were fireworks a weekend ago, but they can't hold a Roman candle to the finale (the "Grand Feu d’artifice pyromélodique", or "Grosses musikalisches Feuerwerk"). Someone told me that some RAD (Rich Arab Dude) donates funds - and they end up being world-class, if not among the world's biggest...
For these fireworks Geneva gets far more congested even than its norm. Yet somehow K & I managed to find parking at the central train station, Cornavin. They had the main bridge, Pont du Mont Blanc blocked off for traffic, and even had the lakeside lanes cordoned off for ticketed seating - 35, 45 or 55CHF apiece. The other half of the bridge was almost completely packed, with a narrow corridor for people to move around.
Then they turn off the bridge overhead lights and all the marquee lights on the surrounding buildings. The fireworks stations are all on "Rive Gauche"(*), and also floating on platforms in the lake. And they had speakers located on Rive Gauche as well, and the sound carried quite well over the water.
This year the City of Moscow was proclaimed the guest of honor of the festival. So there was lots of Russian music to which the fireworks were choreographed. All was well-done, but the portion of the fireworks choreographed to the famous "Swan Lake" theme by Tchaikovsky bordered on the sublime.
I found it not a little ironic that Moscow was being feted with fireworks the day after Russians attacked Georgia and Georgian troops with tanks and artillery shells and air strikes (independent of whatever the underlying politics are, and whoever's right or wrong, which I don't profess to know). Just hours before I had been looking at video footage on the internet that I was eerily reminded of by the fireworks, missiles firing in rapid succession into the night air, multitudinous ear-splitting thunderboomers reverberating off the sides of buildings all around downtown Geneva - and now with victorious Russian music playing - and here in a city dedicated to peace and the peaceful resolution of global conflicts (just check out all the UN offices headquartered here). Just one of history's odd juxtapositions, I guess.
UPDATE: dropshots lets you embed code for video uploaded to it, so here goes: You can see snippets of these fireworks in the following video. The fireworks lasted for ~50 minutes, with a 5 minute break in the middle; I compressed it down to 9 and ran out of camera battery juice before the end :(
Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing - Photo Books
Afterwards, as you can imagine, it took quite a while for the madding crowd to disperse. K went home to relieve the babysitter and I stuck around to marinate in the festival ambiance, which I love. You wouldn't be surprised at the number of teenagers and young adults, or even the number of ethnic minorities hanging around the funhouses and carnival rides and food booths and lakeside bars (bumper car rides are particularly popular! I counted three just on the one side of the lake, "Rive Droite"), but you would have been surprised as I was by the number of children and families having fun into the wee hours. Wee ones up at wee hours, jumping on enclosed trampolines, wending through funhouses and halls of mirrors, some being carried exhausted by their parents, others surprisingly bright-eyed for how late it was. Presumably they are not always allowed to do so, and so a night like this would be well-remembered long after.
Bon fête, wherever you are,
-PKBD
(*) Rive Gauche = left bank - I've been told left and right banks are determined by facing downstream; Lac Leman is really the River Rhone, just as Lake Pepin is really just the Mississippi - just a matter of an order of magnitude in size difference.
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