Bordeaux and Palmiers

I’m always impressed with the sorts of things the French find to fêter. So far, I’ve been to a lemon festival, a violet festival, several film festivals, a fête des fous (festival of the crazy people… sort of like a Mardi Gras festival) and now, an apricot festival. I still love it.

The apricot festival in Rivesaltes is 35 years old. It celebrates the harvest of the local apricots with live music, stalls selling everything from jam to juice to tarts, and an apricot-eating contest, to see who can eat the most apricots in two minutes.

For those of us not participating in the contest, there were also sausages and crêpes, as well as barbe à papa (cotton candy) as big as your head.

The festival wasn’t massive; it only took up the small central town square. And although some of the New York City kids seemed to find it a little bit trite (to be fair, once you did the rotation of all ten or so stalls, there wasn’t much to do besides pull up a chair and tuck in to a barquette of apricots), I thought it was charming. Am I becoming a bumpkin? Hmm… hard to say.

Mmm… apricots.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS