Rock en Seine & Paris

This weekend was Paris's annual music festival, which draws 100,000+ visitors from all over. We missed it last year because of our cruise, so this year we made sure to buy tickets for one night.

The festival is held in Parc St Cloud, a huge park just across the Seine to the west of Paris. The park is filled with 5 stages, tons of food tents, food trucks, and bars. 

With our friends, John and Mallory, we enjoyed Jake Bugg and Blondie. Yes, the Blondie.  Who knew she was still touring?  Conclusion: Her old songs are much better than her new ones. We had to make a poncho fort to protect us during the rain, but were rewarded with a beautiful rainbow by the end. 

Skee and Michelle joined us at this point for the Hives, whose lead singer I decided was incredibly annoying, even if their music was decent. 

Some delicious nachos and guac later and we were ready for the highlight of the night...Arctic Monkeys. Sundays lineup has a lot of big bands too, including Queens of the Stone Age and Lana del Ray. I wish we had bought tickets for that day too, but of course they are all sold out by the time I wanted to buy them!

I don't really consider myself a huge concert goer; sure, I've been to a few concerts here and there, but nothing consistent.  However, I've been to several other concerts this year in Paris, and I think I may now have become slightly addicted. Besides Justin Timberlake, several months ago we saw Young the Giant on a whim when our friends mentioned they were going to the following night. The venue was small and incredible, as well as the music!

Since Michelle was in Canada when we went to this concert, she heard us raving about the venue and decided we should find another concert there. So one random Friday night, when Nick was in Angola for work, Michelle, Skee, and I headed back there to see Saint Motel, who none us had heard of but for 15€ was hard to pass up. 

We ended up being able to stand in the front row, which made the experience even more memorable. Afterward, we hung sound and chatted with the band before the gave us a free copy of their CD. 

Oh, and waaayyyy back in April 2013, just a few months after we moved to Paris, Nick and I saw OneRepublic in concert, also in a fairly small venue. It was a fantastic concert, and I highly recommend one of their concerts if you get a chance. They are seriously talented musically, especially lead singer, Ryan Tedder. Check out the second video, where he remixes all kinds of songs in one {even a little JT}...awesome!

A concert that ends with confetti is always a good one!

I look forward to many more concerts in the future, big names and not big names. So much fun!