Bonne Fête Nationale

Happy National Day

June 24th is a national holiday here in Canada. Everything is closed, with the exception of the shops and restaurants in the tourist areas. Bonne Fête Nationale translates to "Happy National Day." The holiday originated as Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, the feast day of The Nativity of John the Baptist, but like most people and places in Canada, it has long since lost its religious underpinning. Now, there's a huge party on the evening of the 23rd, and then (almost) everyone takes the day off on the 24th to recover.

Our first videos

Since these nifty little iPhones are capable of shooting video, and also because we arrived at the evening party two hours before anything substantial started and had time on our hands, we shot our very first videos.

Tidbit

Everything sounds better in French. The spoken word is elegant and sensual. Music sung in French sounds neat and funky: country, bluegrass, R&B. The one glaring exception is rock-n-roll; it sounds absolutely ridiculous in French. This dude on the right is a big deal in Quebec and was one of the headliners last night, but it sounded like a rock-n-roll parody to me.