Fête de la Musique

As you probably know, yesterday was June 21st--the first day of summer. In France, it's also the newly-created (well, at least since 1981) Fête de la Musique. The Fête de la Musique is like a city-wide music festival. There are large, organized concerts in several main locations, but in addition (and thing I find so charming about the tradition) there are random people that just go out on a street corner and play their instrument for others to enjoy. Garage bands, Rolling Stones cover bands, harpists, Japanese taiko drummers, American-style blues bands, marching bands, chamber music--I saw examples of each of these yesterday evening. Claire and I walked around our neighborhood (the Denfert Lion, shown above, was momentarily confused at the large stage which was constructed around him, but continued to survey his neighborhood faithfully) as well as the Jardin de Luxembourg and Quartier Latin until around midnight or so, and it was still extremely lively when we left.

French Topic of the Day: Health Care. According to the World Health Organization's (WHO) most recent rankings of national health care systems, France opens a can of whup-ass on the United States. In fact, France is rated number 1 whereas the U.S. is rated a shameful number 37, being rated LOWER in fact than countries such as Colombia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Costa Rica. Okay, not everything is peachy in the French health care system according to several doctors I've met here--but I nonetheless get the impression that the level of crisis here is not of the magnitude that it is in the 'States. France is up 16-15!

French for the Day: "due date" in French is "date d'accouchement", though I've also heard several people refer to it as "le jour J" (the French translation of "D-Day", which is kind of humorous that delivering a baby is equated to the storming of the beach at Normandy.)