NEW ORLEA

On July 10th, 2009, the third annual SFNO will commence with El Txupinazo (pronounced choo-pee-NAHT-so) at Rio Mar Seafood Restaurant at 800 South Peters St., from 6-9 p.m. The guest list for this event has been expanded to 300 in order to accommodate the growing popularity of the event. Tickets are expected to sell out, so attendees are encouraged to reserve them early. Email info@nolabulls.com for more information.

Saturday’s encierro begins precisely at 8 a.m. as in Pamplona and will once again feature the Big Easy Rollergirls as the bulls. This year also includes rollerbulls from leagues in Baton Rouge, Houma, Houston, TX and Jacksonville, FL. It will begin at the corner of Conti and Burgundy in the famous French Quarter. After gathering at the Three Legged Dog Bar (see map point 1) at 6:30 a.m. for instructions, over 70 rollerbulls will be unleashed upon the runners (corredores). While death is highly unlikely, there’s always the threat of being battered by a foam-core bat or spraining an ankle! Either way, it will be “run at your own risk.” This year’s attendance is expected to grow significantly from the nearly 1,000 participants at last year’s encierro on July 12th, 2008.

After the encierro, the party continues at the Gazebo Cafe (see map point 2), located at 1018 Decatur Street. Tapas style food, sangria, Marques de Caceres and Dona Paula wines, Stella Artois beer, Old New Orleans Rum and Port of Barcelona Gin drinks, Obsello Spanish Absinthe, Cult Energy Drink and live music and DJ’s will be on-hand for all to enjoy.

SFNO 2009 will also introduce two new events. Saturday night’s Fiesta de Pantalones (Pants Party) at Chickie Wah Wah (2828 Canal St.) features Los Po-boy-Citos and Dr Gumbo’s Spanish Soundsystem, with doors opening at 8 p.m., and the show starting at 9 p.m. Sunday’s Pobre de Mi (Poor Me) at 12 p.m. will close the festival at a soon-to-be disclosed venue. Revelers will have a chance to relive the glory of SFNO 2009 and watch or participate in a Hemingway Contest.

For more information on all events, visit www.nolabulls.com.

A part of the proceeds for SFNO 2009 will go to Animal Rescue New Orleans (ARNO), an organization created and dedicated to the rescue and aid of abandoned and homeless animals in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi, including responding to the immediate needs of those animals in need of medical care, or who have been neglected, abused and deprived of love. ARNO promotes the foster, adoption, and reunion of pets with caretakers, as well as spaying/neutering of all companion animals.

Nola Bulls, LLC was founded 2007 and is a provider and promoter of entertainment and cultural events in the New Orleans area.

By– Chris

Paris, France

I knew I was in a place hardly touristed when a friendly group of French at Bar du Centre gently mocked me for diluting my pastis with too much water and asked me, “What are you doing here?  You wanted to know the real deep France?”.  I responded, “Isn’t this festival des fromages famous?”  The students, seeming a little puzzled looked at one another, snickered and their spokesman said, “Maybe in this region.” This scene occurred at the 10th Annual Festival des Fromages de Meulan where we (i.e. Sarah and I) may have been the only two foreigners (American anyway) enjoying the ‘deep France’ experience.  With the quirkiness of a small town fair paired with world-class cheese and wine along with a jovial atmosphere this festival is a worthwhile excursion if you find yourself in or around Paris during the second week of October.

One of my travel mantras is “be open minded”, which sometimes is challenging but the rewards can be remarkable. The Meulan Festival de Fromages falls squarely into that category.  I came across a billboard advertising the event during a race from Paris to Versailles, in which we finished 13,880th out of 14,000 runners. How we ended up in the race is another story along the same lines of being open minded and taking risks. The short version is that somehow I did not translate ‘race’ to mean that everyone runs the entire 17k’s from Paris to Versailles.  I figured that there must be a walking category, which there was not. This was clear by the 1000s of runners who buzzed by looking at us with a bit of pity and embarrassment and solidified by the French spectators who kept encouraging us by saying, “Have courage you’ll make it!”  TIP:  Just because there may be a “walking” category in your local 5K does not mean that there is one in the Paris Versailles Race.  Nevertheless, talking our sweet time, we saw the beautiful French countryside where we found the billboard advertising the Meulan Cheese Festival. I snapped a picture- one of the perks of walking- thinking to myself that it would be a good Sunday adventure.

After deciding to give the festival a go, a little research was in order. It began with the obligatory Google search which yielded sparse information that confirmed that Meulan exists, but nothing about a cheese festival. I changed preferences to yield French language results and voila I found that the 10th Annual Festival des Fromages was on the local municipality website, no more information than that, but at least I knew it existed.  TIP: change Google to search to the language of the country that you are searching to find more local flavor, then translate the page into English.  Usually the translation hacks up the sentences but it will do a good job on dates and times which are usually most important.  Even with this anemic intelligence we still decided to go, but in the back of our minds we felt that it was possible that it could be a bust.

Getting to Meulan from Paris is easy and efficient as it’s only 40 kilometers away to the west. When we arrived we were still skeptical about this festival, which was reinforced in that we were the only two to get off the train to enter the empty train station.  I swallowed deeply and quickly scurried about to look for some sign of civilization beyond the graffiti tags when we found, hidden away, a stack of fliers and then we saw a person in the ticket office. By simply pointing to the flier the ticket woman got a look of shock on her face as if to say, “Really, you came from Paris for this?”. She recovered and personally escorted us to the door, three meters away, giving us very detailed instructions that we thought might require a TomTom but essentially meant: follow this road to there.  What a nice greeting.

When we saw these dancers, the cheese and wine we knew we had tourist gold.

As we approached Meulan center it appeared that the festival was only a couple of makeshift stands selling cheese and a cafe. My first thought was, “Great. Fantastic. Two awkward events in a row.”   Fearing the worst I distanced myself away from Sarah so I could more easily see if she were to attack. However, we were pleasantly surprised when we looked around the corner and saw mountains of cheese, magnums of wine, folk dancers in traditional garb and hundreds of people. We had had found tourist gold: an authentic experience with heaps of cheap, free even, food and wine. Plus we were really going to have to be effective with our ‘point and pray’ communication technique (i.e. point at something and pray that’s what you get) as we seemed to be the only English speakers. The exception being a four-year-old girl who proudly proclaimed, ‘Je parle l’anglais,’ and counted in English for us, “one, tu, fee, fo, five, ses, seben, eet, nine, dix.”  This and a cold beer started what was a very pleasant, fun and inexpensive “deep France” day in Meulan.

Highlights:

The scene:

After being relieved to know that the festival really existed it went on to exceed our expectations.  The brochure says that there are 100 cheese vendors / makers in attendance with 300 varieties of cheese, this was spot on.  We found that the stalls stretched on for about a kilometer through the main square where many of the stalls were set up.  The atmosphere was complete with folk dancers, one man bands, French rappers, goat milking lessons with the teacher squirting onlookers from the goat’s utter.  So, plenty of entertainment.

The cheeses (les fromages):

With fresh cheese at every corner in Paris I felt that it would be a waste to focus on the common cheeses such as brie, Camembert and chevre so I focused my inner Andrew Zimmern and went for the cheeses that I thought were most bizarre.  Tomme au Marc:  A tomme is a cheese made with cream after much of the fat is removed for butter and richer cheeses; marc is the leftovers (i.e. skins and seeds) after wine making that are also used for grappa in Italy and marc in France.  Together what happens is a crusted, lower fat cheese that pairs well with red wines.  The dark, amost black, shell may be off-putting but I found this cheese very tasty.  Le Lavort:  This cheese comes from Auvergne and is what the French call “full of terrior” meaning that it has the distinct taste of its land of origin.  Kind of like an Italian pecorino but softer and nuttier, Le Lavort looks like a wheel of cheese dunked in dust and dirt.  Actually it was buying this cheese that we had our snag in the day when we got stuck with a €10.00 hunk, which was not too huge but was at least 3x bigger than we wanted.  Sometimes “point and pray” simply does not work.

Pierre, maker of Rose Bonnet

The wines (vins):

What I didn’t anticipate, which I suppose was a no-brainer, was that there would be so many varieties of wine.  There was at lease 40 stands representing many regions and all the owners were more than happy to let us have a sip or taste of their creations.  After sampling a dozen or so rose we chose Rose Bonnet made by Pierre-Yves Perrachon of Chateau Bonnet.  It is smooth, full flavored and not sweet.  Our choice rouge is from Domaigne Chassagne of Beaujolais ( a region in Burgundy) called the Beaujolais Villages.  Even though we should have let it age another 3 to 5 years we still enjoyed the delicious tannin rich wine with its slight undertones of vanilla and red berries.

The food:

One well dressed sandwich

Simple, traditional, cheap and delicious.  Just like going to any small town fair there was a wide selection of easy to eat and bad for you food.  There was a plate called Tartiflette which because of its popularity I imagined an old traditional food but apparently it is the product of an 80’s marketing initiative by the Reblochon cheese trade union.  Tartiflette falls into the oey-goey-cheesy starchy food group and seems about as popular and diverse as macaroni and cheese.  Another interesting set-up was a melted cheese sandwich with ham that the wait for turned out to be the defining moment of this experience.  When we were waiting in line to get this sandwich everything ‘deep France’ seemed to converge into one of those perfect moments.  We had: some type of French rapper, for lack of a better word, who was rapping along with a brass band and creating a pretty good beat (not unlike the bands at Octoberfest), then there were the small children who were dancing, we were dancing, the wine guy was dancing and the sandwich maker who was a good 2 meters tall (6′6″) was rocking out dressed in leotards, thigh high leather boots, a fish-net mini skirt and topped of with a pony-tail restrained scrunchy, while continuing to scrape gooey cheese goodness into baguettes.  Ah, what a scene.

The Meulan Cheese Festival goes in my plus column as a positive experience.  Now onto another hidden place that gets a mere few thousand Google results.  Luckily we got a recommendation for just such a place from Pierre, our rose wine maker, who mentioned a festival in a place called La Chapelle de Guinchay (3,400 Google pages or .0001% of Paris’s pages).  So off we go.

If anyone has any other experiences in these small town festivals let us know.

Happy Travels,

Chris

Hello again.  Welcome to the second of what I hope will be many articles about Paris as I am going to be living in France for a couple of years.

Bastille Day is the celebration of the French independence from royal rule. To be honest, I am not a history buff so I am going to simply report the great time that I had at the 219th edition of Fete Nationale. It was difficult to find much information about the events for the weekend but the tips at the end of this article should be a good start.

My Bastille celebrations started at the Bastille at around 8:00 pm.  I arrived a bit early, as per my usual habit, so I found a cafe that had a great happy hour special of 5 euro for cocktails (more about Parisian Happy Hours another time).  In the square many of the cafes will have specials. I am not recommending the one that I went to as I think they forgot the alcohol in both of my drinks.  At 8:00 the music started and the square started to fill up.  TIP: I saw many people with their own drinks in hand so feel free to bring your own beverages! A few bands were scheduled for the evening… but this was not my final stop for the night so around 8:30 I moved on to the Fire Station on Rue de Sevigne.

The Fete de Pompier that I attended started at 9:00 pm and from the sign outside it looked like it ended around 4:00 am.  When I showed up around 8:45 pm there was already a line outside – so if you are thinking about attending I would show up at least 20-30 minutes early to ensure yourself a spot inside. The cover charge was 6 euro which include a free bevvy at one of the numerous bars inside. Inside the fire station there were 4 different venues. The first was a large outdoor space with tables set up.  The second space was an indoor area that had a DJ playing music and tons of space for dancing – which within 15 minutes of entry they were already at it! The third room was a small indoor space called the ‘Champagne lounge;. The last and largest space in this firehouse was another outdoor space with a large stages set up. In all of the areas there were multiple bars. Some of them serve drinks and others food.  One of the major draws appeared to be the many men in uniform. I stayed for only a short while and the party appeared to only be starting when I left!  I had committed to an early night so that I could attend the parade on Monday.

Monday morning rolled around and I was out the door by 8:00 am. I departed the metro at Place de Concorde and ended up having to walk for about 45 minutes until I was able to reach Champs Elysees. Most metro stations and roads in the area were closed so I walked with hundreds of other tourists and French to find a place to connect with the parade route. By the time that I did it was 9:15 and all of the good places were taken. I found out from other participants in the area that tickets can be purchased to sit in some bleachers and have a good view to the parade. A few suggestions from my time watching the parade- if you like the crowds go for it and head to the area but prepared for a lot people! Before you go pick up the itinerary from a local tourist information counter or buy the local paper to have a good understanding of what you are looking at. If seeing it in person is not all that important to you – I have another recommendation: find a great cafe and watch the parade on TV. I found this view to be better to than the one that I had in person! Also as I was sitting near the area where Concord meets the start of Rue de Saint Germain I was able to see the tanks and uniformed men/women that had finished their time in the parade… it was more intimate than the large view on Champs Elysees.

The last event for the celebration is the fireworks that happen around the Eiffel Tour. Unfortunately as I have work the next day and given my not desirable experience with the crowds at the parade I elected to watch these on TV as well.

Overall it was a fun weekend and one that I recommend attending if you have the chance!

To make your experience more smooth keep these tips in mind:

• Arrive early to the events
• BYOB is perfectly fine for the Bastille concerts
• Be prepared to walk as the Metro and buses do not run
• The parades are also on T.V. so if you are not a fan of crowds find a cafe and watch the festivities on the tele
• Check with the tourist office to purchase tickets to sit in the bleachers for the main parade

Happy Travels,

Sarah

RUNNING OF THE BULLS IN NEW ORLEANS!!!  SECOND ANNUAL:  Many Americans dream of laying their bravado on the line in Pamplona, Spain by participating in the famed encierros of Sanfermines.  Most Americans never get there!  Why?  Probably because they can’t take that much time or spend that much money.  Maybe it’s because their spouse or mom won’t let them!  Well, now they can get as close to that experience as possible, right here in New Orleans.

The second annual San Fermin in Nueva Orleans (SFNO) will commence at precisely 8AM, as in Pamplona, at the corner of Conti and Burgundy in the famous French Quarter.  After gathering at the Three Legged Dog bar for instructions, the bulls, in this case played by 30 of the beautiful, yet equally imposing Big Easy Roller Girls, will be unleashed upon the corredores (runners).  While death is highly unlikely, there’s always the threat of being battered by a waffle ball bat, or spraining an ankle!  Either way, it will be “run at your own risk.”  This year’s turnout is sure to be more than the nearly 200 participants at El Primero Encierro 07-07-07 (The First Running of the Bulls).

After the encierro the SFNO festival continues at the Gazebo Café, located at 1018 Decatur Street.  Tapas style food, Marques de Caceres Spanish wine, Miller High Life beer, and Old New Orleans Rum drinks will be on-hand for all to enjoy along with the DJs and live music, all put together by Nola Bulls.  For more information, visit www.nolabulls.com.

Nola Bulls, LLC was founded 2007 and is a provider and promoter of entertainment and cultural events in the New Orleans area.

If you would like more information about this topic, or to schedule an interview with Mickey Hanning, please call 504.247.3714 or email Mickey at mickey@nolabulls.com.

]]> http://ikangaroo.com/2008/07/07/new-orleans-running-with-the-bulls/feed/ 0 http://ikangaroo.com/2007/10/18/rome-film-festival-2007-kicks-off/ http://ikangaroo.com/2007/10/18/rome-film-festival-2007-kicks-off/#comments Fri, 19 Oct 2007 02:17:20 +0000 Chris http://ikangaroo.com/2007/10/18/rome-film-festival-2007-kicks-off/ Monica Bellucci kicked off the 2nd edition of the Rome Film Festival which runs from October 18th to the 27th.  The festival will screen 140 films from 40 countries including the first one from Francis Ford Coppola in 10 years called Youth without Youth.  The star power will be bright with Sofia Loren set to achieve a lifetime achievement award and actors like Cate Blanchett, Tom Cruise, Keira Knightley, Halle Berry, Sharon Stone, Robert Redford, Tom Cruise, and Sean Penn expected to attend.  Rome is expecting 150,000 people to view the 640 screenings that will be shown all over the city.  With this mega-star power there will be plenty of paparazzi action. If you are into star gazing / stalking and want a chance of getting a picture with a movie star then try passing by the Hassler Roma, Villa Di Medici. This site in the past has been where Tom Cruise stayed with then girlfriend Penelope Cruz. We have word that there will be a swag point, where celebrities will be showered with gifts, at the Hotel De Russie.  However, if you just want to view some films and experience something unique then be on the lookout for screenings that will take place in uber-historic landmarks such as Castle Sant’ Angelo and Piazza Del Popolo among other locations.

Happy Travels

Hello Travelers!

It’s Fashion Focus week in Chicago, which means you can get your fill of models, designers and – of course – socialites looking for the next hot look.  Partnered with the City of Chicago, Macy’s, Saks Fifth Avenue and numerous other retailers, business groups and focused players, this year’s event is features numerous shows throughout the week, including Fashion Focus presented by Macy’s, free on Friday October 12^th.  Work your magic, get spotted, and try to snag an invite to any of the numerous parties sure to fill the city….. Get more information at http://www.fashionfocuschicago.com/ 

Not so much on the mini skirts and silver-lame dresses?  Try the Chicago Film Festival, premiering the potentially inflammatory film “The Kite Runner” this week.  Starring young Afghan actors, the movie has already stirred controversy in topic alone (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6992751.stm), leading the producers to hire former CIA operatives and a diverse team of international relations experts to determine the safety of the film’s release.  Catch it here before it gets banned.  More information on the Chicago Film festival is here: http://www.chicagofilmfestival.org/cgi-bin/WebObjects/CIFFSite.woa/wa/pages/Home 

Then again, you could just stay local: catch some free pool at the Gingerman, 3740 North Clark Street, while gazing at the now-shuttered Wrigley Field and remind yourself: “there’s always next year.”

Happy Travels,

Tai

This year’s fest is taking place from Saturday 22nd to Sunday October 7th and is the 197th edition of the original 1810 wedding festival. 

Average price of a liter of beer is expected to be between 7.50 and 8.00 Euros

There are 14 “tents”.  Each with a certain style.  Do your best to explore a bunch different tents because you’ll  have a much richer experience.

Excellent sight seeing tour:  Mike’s Bike Tours

Recommended accomodation:  Euro Youth Hotel

Fantastic information source: http://www.oktoberfest.de/en/02/content/

Enjoy Yourselves!

Humantla, Mexico- In the 53rd addition of the Huamantlada, one man was killed and 24 others were injured- click here for video but BEWARE it is graphic! The be a bullfigher (torero) for a minute festival is held every year on the 1st Saturday after August 15th in Humantla, which is a city 170km (100 miles) south of Mexico City.  The bulls are let go in the city square for about two hours, participants get their ego on and jump in with their red capes and play bullfighter.  Sounds like a party!  Make your plans for  August 16, 2008 which will be next year’s addition.

Happy Travels