Fifty-eight years after the last Fête des Narcisses in Montreux, Switzerland, some 40,000 people took the streets again to celebrate the beauty, culture, and folklore of the Lake Geneva area. I just so happened to stumble out of the gare centrale just as the band began playing on the Grand Rue along the Quai Edouard-Jaccoud just outside the station. Interested in the Swiss understanding of narcissism, principally to see how it compared with the North American interpretation daffodils, I delved into the sights and sounds of the light-hearted parade.
This swan float recalled the Russian ballets that characterised earlier celebrations of the festival. The local beauty queen held the reigns.
The pursuing band played a variety of upbeat marching tunes, none of which were immediately recongisable to me. But then again, identifying classical music by ear has never been my forte. They sounded polished enough, but they weren’t overly uptight or serious, freely waving to friends and family their noticed in the surrounding crowds.
Inside the Place du Marché theatre, another band played a variety of English-language cover songs as people ate burgers, drank wine they’d brought from home,i and socialised with one another.
Behind the event poster you see below, complete with the exact type of female model and graphic design you’d expect from a rave concert, because design has always been and will always be an international phenomenon donchaknow, is a glimpse of the little $hotel I stayed at.
The view from which :
Yup, it’s good to be me : a daffodil.
___ ___ ___
- You’d NEVER see this in North America. Nor would you see smoking on the patios as you would in Switzerland.↩