ba-steel day weekend

Thursday night was set aside for fireworks on the canal to celebrate the next day being Bastille Day. Two things are interesting here. Firstly, the french, unlike much of the rest of the world, do not call their national day Bastille Day, but instead just fête nationale (national celebration) or quatorze juillet (July 14). Obviously outside the context of France, these terms are ambiguous, thus the renaming, but I still find it interesting. Secondly, they have their fireworks the day before, rather than the day of, the actual date. That I can't explain, although I guess it avoids cutting into the 3-day weekend.

Anyway, I got invited along by Katrin and Ashu, although I didn't manage to find them until after the show was over, due to misunderstandings about canal directions, general disorientation and fairly excessive noise on my end of the phone calls due to high-volume disco music. Still, I ran into Saga, our new Indian/Canadian masters student, so watched the show with him. It was a good show, too, not too long but nice and dense. They played disco over the top to celebrate its 30-year anniversary or something, which was OK, although hearing a french-language cover of Peter Allen's "When My Baby Smiles At Me, I Go To Rio" was surreal to say the least. I took some movies with my camera (trade-off: phone has sound, but camera has better resolution), but they're not particularly interesting, and at this point are in need of rotation.

After that, the weekend rolled by as normal. Shopping, WoW, a bit of reading, a couple of games of footy, and the tri-nations win over South Africa.