Let me just say that, in addition to all the other general strangeness of this week, I woke up to this yesterday morning:
Freaking snow.
[Poor Olive Oil, our olive tree...]
But literally before you could even say "Are you kidding me?" - it was gone. Poof. Vanished. Like it never happened.
Rewind to Tuesday: I went with a friend to her daughter's school Carnival Parade...
Now I tend to find French social functions to be a lot of fun and strange/humorous in general, but my first french
school fucntion absolutely took the cake. Carnival is like the french equivalent of America's Halloween, and people take their costumes very seriously. Some of the costumes were really impressive, like a few robots, monsters and a french dictionary. But one cannot party in costume alone - there must be entertainment! Bring on the clowns!
Or, uh, these guys will do. They were punk hippies who must work by day as clowns at children's entertainment events. The guy on the left is wheeling around a foam shark with a boom box inside blaring rave music (do you really need an excuse in France to blare rave music? The answer is unfortunately NO), and some of the little kids were actually quite terrified of the dragon. (Maybe if he had stopped roaring at them for a minute, they would have stopped crying.) The guy in the plaid on the right was riding a unicycle but also had the front half of the bike - though they weren't connected. The man with the dreads in the middle was a juggler...all, I think it's safe to say, were amateurs. Little did we know, these three men would be the source of the entertainment during the party portion of our afternoon.
So on to the party! Did you know that they serve booze at school functions here in France? For the parents obviously, unless you're a sneaky 11 year-old picking up floaters, which was seen A LOT at the Bastille Day and St. Maurice celebrations this year.
And so, with that, the "clowns" took to the stage.
I think he's the sad clown, you need to use your imagination without the makeup...
Maybe he wouldn't be so sad if the other clowns didn't make fun of him for playing the button accordion...
Maybe if they didn't make fun of him so much, he wouldn't have given up an illustrious career as a button accordionist and taken up the violin, which truth be told he's not very good at. Maybe that's why he's chugging that bottle of vodka on stage.
Wait, what? Pardon?
Did I mention the show was not only really, really, REALLY bad, but also really, really REALLY seemingly non-age appropriate for kids? Not only was there too much dialogue and not enough dancing and noise for what I would think the 3-11 year old set would be able to hold their attention to, but the above picture was of them during a skit. He comes on stage acting drunk, then chugs the vodka straight out of the bottle, and then shares it with his friends (one of whom was dressed as a lady whose boobs I swear got bigger with every act...maybe I had too much cidre). They all then finished chugging the bottle until it was empty and began acting drunk and dancing around chorus line style. What came next you ask? Well a song about vodka of course! (I couldn't make this merde up people.) That's right kids: drink vodka, a lot of it, really fast, and you'll have lots of friends and dance and sing and have great fun. We told ourselves this was French vaudeville, which was a very weak attempt to justify the french theater we had just witnessed.
What else could top off a week of "I can't make this merde up?" Well an
epidemic of the measles in Geneva and the Rhone-Alps region (where we live) of course! Good thing I found this out after spending the day at les puces on Wednesday. Can't wait to go get blood drawn next week to see if we're still immune to the measles or if we need booster shots.
[Measles measles measles!]
Hope everyone out there has a happy and measles free weekend!
A la prochain friends...
