Carnival and customs!
Yesterday was carnival day, which is always entertaining. The carnival is an annual event, largely for the children of the local schools, and involves all the children dressing up in costume and marching around the town centre beating drums and making a lot of noise.
The highlight of the day is Mister Carnival himself, an effigy of, well, almost anything really, but in principle representing a person, that is made of straw and cardboard and leads the procession. A few of the more boisterous children march near the front of the procession, banging drums and tin cans as loudly as possible, while the others throw confetti at the crowd.
After about an hour of this Mister Carnival is put on trial for more or less all the bad things that have happened during the course of the year. He is then judged, always guilty as far as I can tell, and set on fire. A rather excessive punishment I would have thought, but the children love it.
It is usually about now that the fun starts as the spring wind catches pieces of flaming cardboard and blows them about among the happy children, to the general hilarity of all. The pompiers are on hand in case things gets out of control.
So a good time is had by all. The children are pleased that they have had a half day off school to bang drums and make a noise, as are the teachers. Even I enjoy myself and that’s saying something, because as Mrs B will tell you i don’t get out a lot.
On a different note to finish - we have some relatives over from Canada for the weekend (they are in Europe for longer, but France for only two days). On arriving at the airport, having travelled freely everywhere else in Europe, they were told by French Customs they had to get back on the plane and go back to England. Apparently Canadians need an invitation to enter France, in writing, and they didn’t have one.
Luckily the airport is so small that they could see Mrs B waiting for them outside, and one of them was allowed to go and call her in (while the other was told he had to stay in the airport - they didn’t want the two of them making a run for the border, I suppose). A quickly scribbled invitation and all was sorted.
Has anyone else come across this? Is it really the case that foreigners can only enter if they are in possession of a written invitation, that they could have written out themselves ten minutes earlier? What a brilliant idea that only the world of French Bureaucracy could come up with.
