Dancing in the streets!

Yesterday was the music festival in France (la fête de la musique). The country celebrates the start of summer with music playing everywhere: in churches, in concert halls, in bars and pubs, and in the streets – all free.

I started with a organ and trumpet concert at the Abbatiale Saint-Ouen

The Abbey itself is massive. The concert did not start here until 4:00 so I had lots of time to take pictures.

The chairs you can hardly see are set up for the concert itself. There must have been 200 chairs set out.

The organists was excellent. The trumpet player, however, had some good moments and others not so memorable. He seemed to take a bit of a hiatus part way through. I didn’t know the pieces well enough to know if he skipped out of some parts, or whether much of the music was for organ alone. It was still very worth while taking part.

On my way to another venue at the city centre, I stopped by St. Maclou and took more photos. The day was perfect. I loved this church in full sunlight.

There were a few people dancing in the streets next to the church while DJ’s at the neighboring bar played music.

In the city centre there was lots happening. I sat outside at one of the bars near the place where the Brazilian drummers were gathering.

The streets can be very narrow and some, like this one, allow vehicle traffic. Cars move slowly and pedestrians move out of the way…eventually. After the Brazilian drummers started to assemble and the people started to gather around them, I saw three vehicles try to go down the same street. They didn’t get very far until they were blocked by the crowds. One of the vehicles was a city sanitation truck. He decided to back-up and try another route. The other two cars, however, just stayed put and when the drummers moved off down the street with their entourage, they followed very slowly behind.

I loved the music! I followed for a while and caught a little of their music on video. (I tried to upload it, but couldn't)

There were tons of people out – families, young people, old people… I walked back and stopped at a final band playing at the shopping centre near where I live. All having a great time.

I’m glad I live in a quiet part of town. I can imagine that the people played and danced outside into the wee hours of the morning.

Today, I went back to l’Eglise Jeanne d’Arc and there were three baptisms and several First Communions (two of the children baptized were of an age to also received First Communion – no confirmation for them though). The church was full of families – all ages present. I like this community. The people are friendly and all take part. The music is good. I understood much more of the homily and the prayers today. Perhaps because the priest was conscious of the children present so he use words I understood and spoke slowly enough for me to catch what he was saying.

I came back to work on my verb conjugation – a never-ending task. Today it was subjunctive verbs. I went through some of the prayers in the misselette (the prayer book I use for the Mass) and found all the places where the subjunctive was used. The subjunctive is used in the type of sentence where you express a desire, a feeling, a request, an emotion… followed by “that” (que). “I wish that you would help me.” Verb conjugation is one of the most trying parts to the study, followed closely by sentence structure. I’m getting better at seeing the patterns in the written texts, now to keep practicing in my speech.

This week we are reviewing everything from the A-2 level and there will be an exam at the end of the week. I think they spend about 12 weeks on each level. I was in A-2 for the last 2 weeks.I’m not sure I will be ready for the B-1 level yet. We’ll see. Thursday I had another practice test for the DELF exam in October. I’ll see how I did next week. The school is very good about following up with students. We have a journal that we complete every week for the instructor to give comments.

One of the people I met, Kathy, finished on Friday. We had a final sandwich in the park together before she heading to a conference and then back home to Australia. I enjoyed meeting her. There are so many interesting people in the program – of all age levels.