Fête au Quartier

Saturday was the fete au quartier, which is basically a block party for the street I live on. I helped set up tables, and was introduced to dozens and dozens of people. I never thought it was possible for one family to have so many neighbours! We came back an hour or two later for the fete itself. The tables were packed, and little kids ran the streets, selling assorted wares, and services, brownies, and carnival games. Night time came after much incoherent and awkward mingling, and it was time to eat. The salad was tossed, the grills were lit, and so ensued the strangest barbecue I have ever seen. Each family unpacked their meat from their private tupperware container (And what an assortment there was! Not a single meat went unrepresented: strips of horseflesh lay beside thick gourmet cuts of marinated turkey and chicken, spiced steaks cooked atop juicy slabs of ham and under dripping rabbit kebabs, and strings of sausages draped across the whole menagerie) and placed it on the grill to cook, flipping it and prodding it themselves, all waiting around the grill for their family's meal to finish. And if a chef (that's the only thing one could concievably call them), prodded with too much gusto or flipped with too much zeal, and the steak tumbled to the street (or even into the ashes), they picked it up, brushed of the debris, and placed it back on the grill. Afterwards, I was introduced to someone else, a girl who had been an exchange student to Germany the previous year, Pauline. She invited me out to meet her friends (probably since she knew what it was like to know no one), and we went to the big park in the center of town. Surprisingly, I could understand most of what she said, and we had what was a skeleton of a conversation on the way to the park. We met up with her friends, and watched a local ska band, with a rather mediocre trumpet player perform a couple of decent songs, all with the same chord progression. Afterward, we went to the bowling alley where we played a couple of rounds of billiards. We tried to go to XX or Vigntieme, a bar, but I didn't have my ID, so I couldn't get in. I arrived home as the fete was winding down, just in time to watch a few rounds of the most inspired foosball (foot-foot) I have ever seen. The brute force reaction test that I had come to take for granted as the basis of the game, was abandoned in lieu of passing, dribbling, feints, and heretofore unheard of ball manouevres.

On Sunday, I went with my dad and his parents to a beautiful lake in the mountains. There were so many fantastic views of so many things: of the mountains, the crystal blue water, the Swiss chateaus, the valley cities, the snowcapped Alps far in the distance, lake Geneva, Montreaux, and even France. On the way back the car broke down, and we had to wait half an hour for the Swiss Triple A to come get us. We got back to his parents house, which I found vaguely reminiscent of The Godfather's, and they gave us vegetables from the most formidable vegetable garden I have ever seen. There were zucchinis over a foot long; plump, tennisball tomatoes; and veritable bushes of lettuce. The whole system of greenhouses, gardens and trellises must have occupied an acre.