August 16, 2009

These pictures are from Bordeaux – a beautiful, beautiful riverside city, with buzzing streets, excellent food, and wonderful public spaces. I happened to be there on le quatorze juillet, Bastille Day, just over a month ago now. There seemed to be some confusion over which day fireworks would be on – on the 13th we were in a tram station and witnessed a vigorous, full-scale, shout-across-the-tracks, everyone-has-a-point-of-view discussion between all the other people sitting at the station, on the subject of which day the fireworks would or should be on. A guy from Toulouse said the fireworks were simply always on the night of the 13th July. A guy from Lyon agreed. A guy from Bordeaux set them both straight. In Bordeaux, as in Paris, firewords for quatorze juillet are held on the night of the quatorze juillet. That’s the way it is. That’s the way it should be. The guy from Lyon looked affronted and said “c’est pas Lyon, uh!” (“this isn’t Lyon, hey!”) and he was absolutely right. Suitably informed I prepared myself for fireworks the next night.

On the afternoon of quatorze juillet was the annual military parade. The French police and firefighting service are part of the military, so they were involved in the parade too, as well as lots of army people, some of whom had dogs that were very patient with the whole parade concept. A crowd gathered and we joined them to watch. I spent most of the time wondering what was going on, because there seemed to be a lot of pauses. Between pauses some medals were handed out, and every so often one of the many military bands would play the start of a march, and then stop just when I thought some parading was going to happen. After some more pauses the crowd was moved aside by officials and reformed around a path that allowed the paraders to march from the square away from the crowd – to where, I do not know – while fighter jets flew very low and very fast overhead. And that was the parade! I think that the Real Deal Bastille Parade is held in Paris, where the president attends and a ginormous procession of military might moves up the Champs-Élysées.

The fireworks were set off from a bridge over the river and it was truly the best, most amazing fireworks display I have ever seen. It had three parts – but they were so beautifully done that I will call them “movements” (while adjusting my beret and sipping my latté). I’ve never understood the idea of setting fireworks to music, as is so often done in Australia. My aversion is partly because it always involves using coloured fireworks that match lyrics involving colours (red red wine, etc), which is just cliched and predictable – but also partly because the bangs of the fireworks inevitably arrive and overpower the beat of the song. These fireworks, thankfully, had no music. They built to an incredible finale of colour and light and sound, and as the last firework faded the happy crowd cheered and the last noise reverberated around the lovely old streets of Bordeaux.