During the summer months a lot of towns in France spring into life with festivals, night markets, and various events laid on to amuse both locals and visitors alike.
One popular idea both near us and in several other places in France is ‘medieval re-enactments’ where everyone in the town dresses up in ‘olden-days’ costumes, paint gruesome wounds on themselves, and march around waving wooden swords and making small children cry.
Centres like Puy-de-Fou in the Vendee and Castillon la Bataille take the idea to extremes with their multi-cast historical re-enactments (note: people keep telling me that Puy-de-Fou is a great experience, not to be missed if you are in the Vendee area, while reports about Castillon la Bataille seem a bit more mixed).
Anyway, with all this excitement elsewhere I was pleased to see that our own local town is having a festival this week. The program tells me that a couple of the highlights include:
1) An introduction to quantum physics (in two parts)
2) A series of discussions about the philosopher Bergson (aperitif included you’ll be pleased to hear)
3) A special showing of a film of Prometheus Unbound (a Greek story by Aeschylus)
I might be wrong, and perhaps there are large numbers of holidaymakers wanting to spend their evenings having intellectual discussions – but I would guess most of the people who stay in our gites have got slightly less serious plans, typically based around barbecues and alcohol.
But if you are looking to improve yourself during your stay in France head on down here – tickets are a very reasonable 8 euros each, or 40 euros if you want to attend lots of different events. I’m guessing they won’t quite have sold out yet.
And a quick look at the page about Bergson on wiki tells me that ‘Bergson convinced many that immediate experience is more significant than rationalism and science for understanding reality‘. Which I take to mean that having a great holiday is more important than talking about philosophy…
Boris said.
“One popular idea both near us and in several other places in France is ‘medieval re-enactments’ where everyone in the town dresses up in ‘olden-days’ costumes, paint gruesome wounds on themselves, and march around waving wooden swords and making small children cry.”
In Norfolk you can go to East Dereham market every Friday and see something like that, only its not a re-enactment.
You might be right here as well, perhaps medieval day is when everyone dresses naturally and the rest of the year they are just pretending to be modern and civilised…
Unemployment has fallen again this month, so it may keep confidence for people to take holidays, but of course we have the left led by the BBC that were spouting doom and gloom then these figures proved them wrong. It shows that the recovery will be led by the private sector as there is a freez in government recruitment. When the 25% cuts start to bit in the reductions to government departments we may see a rise, but these will be non productive jobs in the true sense. It is hoped with the low £ ( thank goodness we are not in the Euro)the private sector will coninue to grow with luck and a fair wind.
So things may be not too bad for the holiday sector in the med. and longer term.
So you may get your intellectual holidaymakers as redundant civil servants spend their redundancy payments.