Montreux, the Jazz Festival

We got on the three hour train to Montreux hoping for an exciting weekend of music and fun. We weren't disappointed.

When we got to Montreux we wandered around for a while saw some of the sites, familiarized ourselves with the area. Then we met up with some other people that came later and headed to our Swing/Jazz boat cruise around the lake. The boat was very nice and the music was really good. They had live bands playing and pumped the music all over the boat through big speakers. The whole thing probably lasted about 2 and a half hours and was great.

After the boat cruise we headed over to the hostel to check-in and lose our bags to continue the party. The weather was kinda crappy with intermittent rain so the crowds weren't very large for the last day of the festival. It made it really easy to watch the concerts they had and to get around.

As we were walking around in the rain I saw a huge puddle and decided it would be a good idea to jump in it to get once of the people I was with wet. Anyway I jumped in we had a good laugh, but then some random really really drunk "French" guy came up to me and started talking in French. Now his French was probably about as good as mine, which is fairly good, but not amazing or anything. He was saying that I got him wet and he was getting in my face and I think I surprised him when I responded in French. Anyway he asked me where I was from I told him Calgary. Then he said he was from LE France, now for those of you that don't know French it is correctly called LA France. Very subtle difference but I don't think someone from France would actually get that wrong. Anyway, I didn't question him on it. I think he was just trying to start some trouble and didn't expect me to know French. I showed him!

We saw one band called Brass Machine, they played old famous pop songs except they had horns going and were a lot of fun. One of the singers (there were four) looked amazingly like a young David Hasselhoff...I wonder what the last time The Hof came to Europe was? Anyway he was the best of all the singers, had the most stage presence, and sang the best songs. We nicknamed him The Half...and were yelling for the half the whole concert. After they closed down their set we wandered around for a while, didn't see too much going on so we headed back to the hostel for the night.