August 1st is Swiss National Day, and is something mostly celebrated at the local level, rather than there being large nation-wide celebrations. The celebrations in Geneva seem to rotate around the various Cantons (of which Geneva is one of 26 in all of Switzerland), so the actual scope of festivities themselves also changes from year to year. I tried to get as much information as possible about what exactly we were doing and what these celebrations were all about, but the only local Swiss person I know turned out to be just as confused as I was.
The official poster for the celebrations, which are all around town...I thought it was a nice cartoon exaggeration of slightly crazed looking people ready to light things on fire...turns out it was frighteningly accurate.
The main celebrations here were at Plainpalais, so I headed over there in the afternoon to see what all was going on. It's been really hot here, so I stayed over there for a bit before moving around and then heading back for the evening party.
Chariot races to kick things off...again...not really sure why...but ok.
The whole city was very patriotic, the normally yellow trash bags all over the city were temporarily replaced with these flag bags...and now today are all back to the yellow.
Flags hanging out in the street.
Even the cathedral had giant flags up. The left one is the Swiss flag, and the one on the right is for the Canton of Geneva
Not exactly Swiss Day related, but I did finally see the rainbow in the fountain!
Even the carnival rides were being patriotic, many of them hanging random flags around (oh yes...all the carnival rides along the lake opened yesterday too...and they're around for the next 10 days)
One thing that has sort of surprised me here is how popular hamburgers are. Everywhere I go people say, "oh they have a great burger there, you should totally try one". I had yet to actually try one here, so I decided dinner yesterday was an ok time to start. It's probably the closest thing to an "American" burger as I've had over here, but apparently there are some that will far surpass this, so I'm excited to try some of those as well.
Alright. Now we get to the craziness. Despite how light things look in this picture...it's about 9pm and time for everyone to get their torches. These are essentially extended paper towel tubes wrapped in cheesecloth that's been soaked in wax, with a little cardboard wax drip catcher thing at the bottom.
We're all going to parade around with these torches while following this horrifying looking bunch of people. We start with a "bear" in a cage being pulled by two of these creepy things, a fire breathing one on stilts, several playing these drums on a float type thing, and several just wandering around trying to scare people. Again...still looking for any explanation as to who they are or why we're doing this. It just reminded me of Krampus, but he shouldn't come around till Christmas...so...
And yes, these are not nice tame little candles...these are torches...and even small children have them...I was fairly certain at this point that I would be seeing the inside of a Geneva hospital burn unit.
Off we go marching through the streets following this creepy band of creatures.
Here is what happens when the flame works its way down to the wax catcher disc thing...the entire handle catches fire and you'd better drop it quickly or your hand will also be on fire. Thankfully I dropped mine on the sidewalk where nobody was about to run into me...nor was there anything flammable on the ground...there were small fires littering the street and sidewalk from these.
And then we reached a part where there were these giant snow making machines, straight off of a movie set...again...why is it now snowing? I have no idea.
Then, as we came down around this hill into this other park, with our loud drumming and fire...we come upon these two guys playing the alphorn...rather beautifully actually...we seemed horribly out of place
Back at Plainpalais, they're heading towards the bonfire ring.
And the horrifying beast/people are running up and terrifying children in the crowd...
The elected officials and beasts getting their torches to light the giant bonfire.
Once this thing is lit it goes up rather quickly
And the wind is picking up and blowing it straight in my direction...
I back up through the massive crowd...at this point the fire department is trying to control it with hoses, nobody seems all that concerned...but there are bits of burning debris and water being blown over us by the wind.
There were also some fire works at the other end of the space...again...people standing directly under them...
There was a larger fireworks show on the lake last night, but I decided to stick with the crazy bonfire instead. We get several large fireworks shows in the next week or so, so I feel like even though I missed the Fourth of July in the States, this will more than make up for whatever pyrotechnics I missed.
I think that's about all for my first Swiss National Day...I will continue to try to figure out what exactly was going on, but as far as experiences go, it was definitely a memorable day. I do have lots of other pictures and bits of things from the past week, but I'll put those all together in a different post soon!
No comments:
Post a Comment