Another year, another Fête

Saturday, August 6 & Saturday, August 13 2011

Now that we’ve hit our one-year mark, we’ve started to double up our experiences on holidays and festivals (aka “fêtes”).  It was time again for Fêtes de Genève, an extension of the Swiss National Day celebrations in Geneva to a three-week festival.  To be quite honest, at times this year’s festival was more of a headache than a celebration as hoards of people plugged up our peaceful bike route through the Jardin Anglais waterfront park each day on our way to work.  Inconveniences aside, we did take some time to celebrate during the festival. :)

  

Our first taste was to watch the water ski jump competition, which sounded cool enough.  To kill time before it started, we first moseyed around the different booths looking for some delicious Indian food because the theme of this year’s festival was “Incredible India” (as a reminder, a different country sponsors the festival each year - last year was China, the year before was Russia).  Apparently we didn’t know where to look because we never located any Indian food, so we settled on Chinese instead (and later we watched our friends, that did find the booth, enjoying some delicious looking Indian food).  Oh well, onto the ski jumping…

So, when we heard ski jump competition, the first thing that came into each of our minds was that they’d be doing some crazy flips and other tricks.  The first jumper lined up, raced towards the ramp, and straight as an arrow flew several meters into the air and landed with a huge slapping sound.  Maybe this was a warm up round?  As each jumper proceeded to do the same “trick”, we slowly realized that that was a long jump competition.  Ahhhh.  It was still kind of cool but after the 3^rd jump you kind of get the idea.  If we weren’t keeping ourselves occupied by talking with friends we probably would have left after 10 minutes.

The highlight of the fête each year, however, is the fireworks show!  You may remember last year’s post about our rooftop viewing party on Dave’s bosses’ roof?  It was such a good time that he threw the same party this year so we went back for round 2.  To confirm our theory from last year that Geneva knows how to do fireworks right, they put on an equally amazing show this time around.  Who knows, maybe this time next year we’ll still be hanging around Geneva post-contract for round 3?!