Geneva Gibber

This was my first 4^th of July that I’ve spent outside the US, and I was a little bummed about not being home barbequing and spending the day on the lake. Luckily, there were festivities in Geneva, so we still had a chance to celebrate. The Geneva American Club hosted a party complete with line dancing, hot air balloons, bumper cars, bands, and the one thing no 4^th party can be without, a fife and drum core. We made it to the party around 8:30, starving for dinner, and excited about the prospect of eating lots of American food; we ended up rather disappointed. There was one tent that served miserable looking hamburgers, with a line at least 40 or 50 people long. This line in the US would not have been entirely daunting, but in Europe a line of four people takes about fifteen minutes to get through, so waiting in the hamburger line was out of the question. The other three tents served kebobs, Thai food, and crepes, the evening of Americaness was not starting out very American. In fact, none of the people who worked at the tents spoke English, and I would guess that over half of the people in attendance, including the cowboy hat-wearing line dancers, were in fact Swiss. There was just as much French spoken at the party as there is on the streets of Geneva. I must say it’s rather disturbing to walk past a woman in a cowboy hat and boots, a ruffled skirt, and a tasseled jacket, and here French coming out of her mouth. It’s like you’re watching a dubbed Western film, except it’s real life.

Having settled on a kebob, and springing for the over priced Budweiser (you can’t drink European beer on the 4^th) we wandered over to the TV screens to do something entirely un-American… watch the German v. Italy World Cup semifinal. While standing by the TVs, I bumped into two of the Algerian participants from my work. They were quite excited about the festivities and were going to the bandstand to hear some more American music, which they apparently loved.

A half an hour later, fed up with crowding around a tiny TV screen to watch a match I really didn’t care about, I wandered over to the bandstand to see if I could find the entire Algerian group (six of them had come to the party). When I arrived, I found a highly amusing site – Algerian men dancing to Blue Suede Shoes. It’s not something you can really appreciate unless you’ve seen it in person, but just imagine a lot of flailing about, some air guitar, and an overall complete lack of rhythm. One of the men saw me in the crowd and invited me to come dance with them. How could I resist – it was going to be one of those rare situations where I looked like a great dancer because I was surrounded by awful dancers. We danced for at least an hour or two, during which time they insisted that I teach them how to dance like Americans. It is important to note that they meant, dancing like the other Americans around us, which was older couples dancing in a 60s rock fashion (there was no grinding involved). So we did some basic twirling and attempted that one move where you both put your left elbow over your head and slide your hands down the other persons arm, and grab hands at the end (did that make any sense). Anyhow, that move was less than successful, so a good portion of the dancing just meant me being twirled and being very, very dizzy. Needless to say, I laughed a lot.

After the dancing, there were fireworks, which were a bit erratic, but the grand finale was stellar, so that made up for the occasional three-minute pauses we had to wait through in the middle of the show. The end of the night was capped with another half hour of dancing, before my ride (Chandler has a car!) was ready to go. All in all, it was a wonderful 4^th of July, even if it was only vaguely American.

# posted by Hoptrop : 1:59 PM