Fête de la musique Genève

This weekend, there is a big music festival in Geneva called Fête de la musique (a very creative name). A group of summies (summer students) were interested in going, so I went into old town Geneva around 8pm with them so that I would meet some of the non-American summer students, explore the town a bit and (of course!) enjoy good music.

Most of the evening was spent traveling in a herd, which was fine by me. I'm going in again tomorrow and will enjoy the music more seriously then. As it was, we rambled from marching band (including a jazzy version of Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever, with an extremely clean piccolo solo and only a nod to the dogfight section near the end) to jazz to young (and ... to put it nicely ... still learning) violinists playing classical music and on. While rambling, I met a good deal of the folks in our herd. There were several guys from Holland, a few from Canada, a girl from Finland/Poland (she goes to school in one and is her home country, but I'm not sure which is which), one guy from Mexico, four girls going to school near Paris and at least two from the UK. I seem to recall at least one German, too.

A few shout-outs from the night:

• All you ballroom dancers (Katie, Ed, Sam, Dan...) : two of the people in our group started swing dancing by the marching band's band stand, which sparked a discussion about getting summies together and having those who know teach those who don't know as much. One of the guys in the group is a particular fan of jive and seems rather biased against swing; however, there's plenty that like that, too!
• Katrina & Allison : contact ball and expressive (almost modern) dance to the music from Amelie. I couldn't convince people to stay for the next act, which involved Chinese yo-yos. I saw a set of clubs inside the circle that had formed, too.
  
• Friends from el Grupo Guay : flamenco dancing! Enough said.