France-tastic

Saturday night, Paris went off. While, technically, yes, it was just a quarter final win, still several games from ultimate success, you would never have guessed it from the celebrations after France beat Brazil, the World Cup favourites, on Saturday. As soon as the final whistle blew, the street filled with thousands of people, and the party really started!

The fountains were full of people, several of whom felt inspired enough to get their gear off, and the tops of the bus shelters got so crowded that people started getting on top of the buses. Luckily most of them (the buses, not the people on top, they were dancing up a storm!) couldn't do any more than crawl forward through the throngs on the streets, so I don't think anyone was hurt too badly, though I did see one guy trying to climb off a coach and basically just fell! In the midst of all the madness were a couple of guys with bongo drums going nuts, as was everybody in fact! It was awesome, people were just so happy and celebrating madly, waving huge flags and shirts, dancing, singing, jumping up and down. And it went on for most of the night, streets were blocked off and the ones that were open were full of cars with people either hanging out the windows with flags or sitting on the roofs, horns permanently held down and plenty of screaming.

And now of course, Brazil beaten, everybody is aiming high! I am writing this celebratory post now rather than later in case that goes horribly wrong, but I can tell you that people have had to rearrange their schedules with this unexpected success. For those of you who haven't been following the Bleus' campaign, they weren't exactly on fire the first couple of games, so no one expected them to get even this far. Hopefully there will be more celebrating to do because I left my camera at home on Saturday!

So now, allez les bleus!!!!!!!!!!