Bastille Day, Reinvented — Heatwave Edition

The news didn’t exactly come as a surprise. It’s been extremely hot and dry, so one by one, the traditional Bastille Day fireworks were cancelled all over the country, including in Nantes and the surrounding area.

The awesome Bal des Pompiers was cancelled too. Not only was it probably not a great idea to queue for hours under the sun to get in—it’s an extremely popular free event—but firefighters were presumably busy, you know, fighting fires.

Oh well.

On the plus side, museums offered free admission during the heat wave. One of Nantes’s museums has air con. The Musée d’arts was packed for a week straight—wonder why.

But I wasn’t going to spend Bastille Day at the museum.

How did we reinvent the holiday without its hallmark fireworks and in scorching heat?

Easy.

We headed to the beach, to Saint-Gilles-Croix-de-Vie again on the 13th and the 14th. Their celebrations, including fireworks, were still very much on, with marching bands, live bands and shops open for all your giant ice cream needs. Smart.

The endless stretch of sand had lively spots and empty ones and, oh, the water was warm enough to swim. No, Mark, it’s not 1°C; it’s 21°C—the “2” was erased.

We took the train back to Nantes just in time for the 9 p.m. FIFA World Cup semi-final between France and Spain. Mark and I wandered around the streets to capture the atmosphere. Yeah, even for a football dummy like me, it quickly became obvious that France was losing.

“Are French people going to riot if they lose?” Feng had asked me the night before in our daily email exchange.

“Nobody riots during summertime, silly you,” I replied. “The protest and riot season usually runs from March to June and from September to December. And people don’t riot over World Cup matches. I don’t care what conservative newspapers say: ‘violence and chaos’ aren’t about to break out. Half the time, it’s complete propaganda.”

In Nantes, the French took the loss gracefully. Booze was drunk—the same would have happened if they’d won—and sighs were sighed, but no Spanish flag was burned. Hell, half the people watching the game in bars were munching on Spanish ham and tapas.

Now, I’m pretty sure we would have set fire to a few chosen buildings if France had ended up playing the US in the final.

I did miss the fireworks (and all those Molotov cocktails the foreign right-wing media had talked about).

It was still a fun Bastille Day.