Chris and Britt: Bastille Day, July 14

So to go back in time a bit…July 14th is France’s national holiday, known as Bastille Day. It commemorates the storming of the Bastille prison and the beginning of the end for the aristocracy. Paris celebrates by holding a huge military parade as well as fireworks all over the city. Our friends Ashton and Alaina stayed with us between ending their vacation and moving back to Canadia and we decided to attack the festivities together. We hit the parade late and ended up being like 20 rows of people back from being able to see anything. I don’t want to say we overcompensated, but since we missed the parade we decided to camp out on the Champ de Mars (park in front of the Eiffel tower) so as not to miss the fireworks or night concerts. We ended up being there from 12:30 to about midnight. Ashton and Alaina stayed the whole time, while we ventured home to get food and supplies and stuff (which is why they fried in the sun and we didn’t).

The night concerts were fun. Some of the most famous acts in France were there-so famous in fact that the majority only went by one name, like Jenifer, Christoph, and a few others I choose not to remember. Christoph Mae was also there (he’s a big deal in France, like a French Jack Johnson) as well as James Blunt. We entertained ourselves by making fun of James Blunt’s singing for quite some time. The fireworks were pretty cool, but the most intense part of the evening came with the end-of-event crowd control. Parisian cops set up RIDICULOUSLY unnecessary perimeters. In this case, instead of leaving the park open so that the 500,000 people could clear out in like 10 minutes as would be LOGICAL, they closed the park so there were only two small exit points, creating this massive funnel effect. We were misdirected and then followed by about 50,000 people. We soon found ourselves at a barrier staring a line of cops in the face with the 50k people at our back, leaving us no escape route. The said 50k were unable to move and so it turned out to be a stand off between about 5 cops and our 50k people. I may need to remind you that July 14th commemorates a REVOLUTION, so when some people started chanting “Vive la Revolution” we had our concerns. Luckily we made it home alive and luckily the cars on the street we were on remained unburned, despite French riot custom.

This was the mob at the parade. All we saw were people and no parade. Some ingenius retailer sold periscope looking things so you could see over the crowd to see the marching.