Thursday night we celebrated our second official Fêtes de Bayonne since living in France! The Fêtes de Bayonne is the largest festival in all of France and happens every year, for five days, starting on the Wednesday before the first Sunday in August. All the festival-goers wear all white with red bandanas around their neck and red sashes around their waist. It’s not to be confused with San Fermin, the festival with the running of the bulls in Pamplona, where everyone also wears red and white. The Fêtes de Bayonne was actually originally inspired by San Fermin, but no bulls are really involved, it’s basically just the locals’ excuse to have a huge party.

We took the bus to Bayonne from the main station in the center of Biarritz, right by our house, with our friends Ashlee and Daniele. It was only about a 15 minute bus ride to the center of Bayonne, filled with passengers all dressed in white and red. The streets of Bayonne were packed with people, everyone wearing white and red, colorful bunting flags strung across the narrow streets, the roads completely covered in colorful confetti, and little pop-up bars selling beer, wine, sangria, in the classic plastic festival cups that you buy for 1€ and then have re-filled all night. There are also snack bars setup around town selling my favorite thing, meat cones! For just 3€ you get a cone filled with Jambon de Bayonne, or you can get a jambon sandwhich, a plate of jambon, pretty much jambon in any form you can think. That’s the local version of ‘bar food’, and it’s awesome!

I also came across a stand selling red berets, white tshirts, Fêtes de Bayonne memorabilia, and randomly a big pile of Basque Taz’!!! If you knew me when I was little then you know about my world’s-largest (yep, largest!) Taz collection – any material item you can possibly think of, I own it with Taz on it. I stopped collecting when I was about 14 or 15, and now my collection is packed away somewhere in my dad’s garage, but I will admit that still to this day, when I see something with Taz on it, a little light in me goes on and I think about buying it and adding it to the collection. So how random to be at the Fêtes de Bayonne in Basque Country, and see a stuffed Taz holding a Basque flag! No other Looney Tunes characters, just a random pile of Taz’. Am I crazy for wanting one? I didn’t buy one, but if I ever see them again…

Thursday night was the hosted Quiksilver party in Bayonne for all the employees. Even though I don’t work at Quik anymore I go with Brent and crash it since most of our Biarritz friends are there, and it pretty much takes place in the street, with thousands of other people, so it’s not that hard to crash. Quiksilver has a Peña on one of the streets in the center of Bayonne, which is basically a big empty room that kinda looks like a garage, with only a bar and a dj in it. They have endless kegs of beer and champagne flowing, bowls of bread and plates of jambon on the bar, and everyone just drinks and drinks and drinks and dances. We hung out with old freinds, new friends, got to practice our French, and bonded with Brent’s co-workers, it was a realy good time!