So this past week has been super hectic with a few big essays due that are equivalent to our exams. By the time the essays were finished, we decided it was time to relax and take part in the annual Beaujolais nouveau wine celebration. (Or that’s what we intended on doing anyway).
So basically, every year on the third Thursday of November, the Beaujolais region of France (just north of Lyon) produces and releases the first wine of the season. It’s called Beaujolais nouveau, and it’s the only wine that’s allowed to be legally consumed in the year its produced. So in Lyon, at midnight on Wednesday there are big celebrations in the streets with fireworks and free wine and everyone has a good time celebrating this new wine.
So, naturally, we wanted to see what all of this was about. While we were getting ready to go out though, Elisa and I started hearing cheering and shouting, and cars honking in the street. So loud that the noise was coming through the windows! We had no idea what was going on but we were on our way to meet some other friends and decided to walk to see if we could find out what all the cheering was about. Well, it didn’t take long to figure it out. It turns out that Algeria won a big soccer game against Egypt and the fans were EVERYWHERE. People were running around yelling and chanting, cars everywhere had people hanging out of them with flags. There were fireworks in the street and torches, and flares...it was crazy. Amid all of this included thousands of people gathering and cheering. Somehow among all of the people they were able to coordinate a cheer...(1,2,3, viva Algérie) We thought it was pretty funny and cool to see how crazy the European soccer fans actually are, and after taking a bunch of pictures and some videos, we continued to meet our friends.
Little did we know that a couple of hours later, the celebrating would still be going on! ..we ended up in a square trying to find the Beaujolais nouveau but instead found more fans celebrating. Only this time it was on a much larger scale. Thousands of people were gathered and this time the riot police turned up. We were trying to get through the mob to another part of town and as we were going one direction everyone started running the opposite way! I’ve never seen so many people running away so fast. We sort of got caught in the crowd and all of a sudden we were face to face with the riot police who were shooting rubber bullets into the crowd!!!!!!!!!! It was so scary and we had to run away very fast! It went from happy cheers to screams! Needless to say, we were very afraid and got away from the area VER quickly. We were all fine, just a little frightened.
The next day the newspaper said that over 27 cars were burned!
Who knew French fans could be SO crazy.
On the plus side, I did end up trying Beaujolais nouveau eventually J
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