Marche Pour Jesus

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending the Marche Pour Jesus (March for Jesus) in Paris. The parade had 6 or 7 different trucks with bands playing live music, and each truck had a crowd behind it. The lead truck was playing a very diverse collection of music that had been organized ahead of time. They also handed out the words to everybody before the march so even if we hadn't practiced up ahead of time (like me) we could follow along.



All of the trucks after that played whatever came to their minds at the moment. So after about an hour behind the main truck I started drifting backwards through the parade. I danced along for a little while behind the second truck, which was vibrating African rhythms, and then joined the "Juifs pour Jesus" (Jews for Jesus) who were waving banners and blowing shofars behind a much smaller truck. I skipped the Brazilian truck because I don't speak a word of Portuguese and joined up with another couple hundred vigorous dancers near the end of the parade. I think there were about 5 of us white folks in that crowd. It was fun.


I think my favorite people where a dozen or so Indians (You can see their flag in the photo above). They were behind the main truck but they were far enough back that you couldn't hear the truck very well. That was convenient because you COULD hear the Indians VERY well. All they had was a tambourine and their voices but they kept up the music coming at full energy for the entire 3 hours. It was a fun mix of French, some Indian language I don't know, and English. They usually started a song in English or Indian, then switched it into French. Sometimes I'm pretty sure they were doing the translation on the fly.



The theme song for the event is HERE

La Suisse

Well, you may have noticed that I haven't gotten around to posting anything about the rest of my Switzerland trip. Maybe someday. In the mean time, here is a montage of my video footage from the trip. Don't worry, it's only 3 minutes long :-)

Another story

Here is a quicko translation of the story I just wrote for class.

"For starters, we forgot the motor. Not the motor for our car, mind you, but the motor for the boat. If we had forgotten the motor for the car I think we would have noticed. When we got to the lake we made a sail out of our rain jackets, and with that contraption we succeeded in reaching the middle of the lake. We hung out there for three hours trying to catch some fish. Unfortunately we had also forgotten our bait. We tried using cheese as bait, but after three hours we had no more cheese and still no fish. All we had left was some bread.
Before we had time to try using bread as bait, it started to rain. We frantically demolished our sail and put on our raincoats. We heard rolls of thunder. This made us nervous because without our sail we were stuck in the middle of lake. Suddenly a flash of lightening struck the metal pole that we had jimmied to hang our "sail." The lightening dismantled it for us. It also succeeded in pitching us overboard.
We swam to shore, pushing the boat ahead of us. When we got there we discovered that the metal pole had been a more important part of the boat trailer than we had thought. In the end we dragged back home without fish, without food, and without a boat. In addition we were scorched and soaked at the same time, a truly bizarre situation!