Orléans Part I

As part of my mini cultural tour of nearby France, I visited a friend in Orléans last weekend. Orléans is a large town about 80 miles south of Paris, which is most famous for its various connections to Joan of Arc. If you don't know that before you get there, you certainly will when you leave. There is, in Orléans: a Joan of Arc House, a Joan of Arc statue, a Joan of Arc memorial, another Joan of Arc statue, a Joan of Arc café, and a Joan of Arc restaurant. You get the idea.


One of the Joan statues. Here she has a sword.


You can tell you've spent too much time in Nantes when trams are a tourist attraction.

My friend in Orléans is an English assistant in a nearby village called La Ferté Saint Aubin. On the Friday night, his school was putting on a dinner/concert in the village hall, so I went along to see it. How long does an average school concert last? An hour and a half? Two hours, maybe? Not in France. Seven hours. Seven. We didn't get home until 3am.

It was a strange set up, with the 40 pupils serving as waiters and performing the concert - those who weren't participating in a particular song would come out and bring the food to the audience while the others performed.

Some of the pupils were absolutely incredible at singing. There was one girl, who must've been about 15, but she had the most amazing voice i've ever heard. We sat on the teachers' table, so we got the inside information on various pupils who were performing. The incredible 15 year-old girl, who had the confidence to sing a solo in English, in front of 400 parents, is apparently too shy to put up her hand in lessons.

The evening was made up of a mixture of French songs, and English songs. Everything was covered, from Les Misérables, to Abba. There was even an hour-long rendition of the musical 'Wicked'. Every single word was learned off by heart, even down to the the dialogue between songs. How a 13 year-old cast can even sing in English, let alone off by heart, baffles me. It was a seriously impressive spectacle. It also made me want to become a music teacher in a French school. Now just the lack of musical skill and French to overcome first.