A sunnier side of Narcissus.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The view from which :

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Yup, it’s good to be me : a daffodil.

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  1. You’d NEVER see this in North America. Nor would you see smoking on the patios as you would in Switzerland.

9 thoughts on “A sunnier side of Narcissus.

  1. […] and labour will do what labour does best, which is work, while the government goes back to planning public festivals and generally staying the fuck out of business and other matters of import […]

  2. […] Switzerland ? Well, now you do. And now you can choose whether to blame the Nordics or the Neutrals Narcissists for the unrecyclable beasts. […]

  3. […] Engineer” of Potemkin shell corp “Vinumeris,” last known to reside in the otherwise lovely nation of Switzerland , and with the deeply lulzy G+ bylineiv […]

  4. […] you’re budgeting your own trip to the mountains, Fairmont hotels in May, whether in Banff or Montreux or whatever other exquisite destination you might have in mind, run about $500 per night. Still, […]

  5. […] but. BTC is BTC is BTC and it’s in fact the dollar that’s wavering in the breeze like so many daffodils. Bitcoin is following a highly predictable inflation curve. Everyone else is heading for the […]

  6. […] my stay included the rather lovely Jazz Fest in the heart of the slowly reviving Exchange District. Montreux it ain’t but on the 5468796-designedviii main stage were a variety of very talented acts […]

  7. […] necessarily prefer it over the calmer and more reassured customer service experience at, say, Fairmont hotels. […]

  8. […] never objects of desire to be plastered on a kid’s wall everywhere from the favelas to Montreux. Anyways. […]

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