J'aime bien la musique

Sorry for the delay; the past couple of days have been jam-packed with adventure. Thursday night was Fête de la Musique, a huge party where professional and amateur musicians alike perform in the streets of Paris. There are some listed events/staged performances, but you end up walking/taking the metro from place to place, following your ear to wherever a crowd of people have started to gather as a result.

I was able to meet up with my friend, Anna, from Harvard this week, which was simply lovely. She's doing an internship where she translates Surrealist history/artifacts from French, which sounds wayy more legitimate than what I'm doing. Ah, well. She doesn't have homework, I guess.

We went to Fête together, starting at the Comedie Française, where an orchestra was playing a rock ballad.

Then we heard a rock music in the courtyard nearby, where a Swiss group was playing catchy, folksy songs in English, interspersed by commentary in French and German. Some of their lyrics were a little strangely translated, with lines like, "I want to be your hamburger when you're eating fast food," or, "I got a little bit shit-faced last night, yeah, yeah!" Nonetheless, it was enjoyable.

Then we headed over to a corner café, where a jazz singer was pouring her heart out in soulful melodies. So typical Paris.

We ended the night back at the apartment of a family friend's where Anna's staying, talking to the daughter and her friends in Frenglish. I spent the night and then took the Metro back home the next morning, still wearing my black dress, very walk-of-shame like.

I took a shower and then got ready to meet up with my friend, Maddie, from my grammar class, for an all day (and night) concert called, "Solidays." It was actually a three-day music festival, but we only bought tickets for the first day to see the acts we knew. Other than some trouble getting home (we tried to catch a taxi for a couple hours to no avail until we finally decided to wait for the Metro to open at 5:30am), it was a really fun night and all of the bands were fantastic.

So after waking up at 2pm, I'm hoping to meet up with some other friends from Harvard who finally arrived this morning. It's not helping with my French immersion, but I'm really looking forward to seeing them. And we'll probably go out again tonight. As my host dad can now tell you, YOLO.