A number of months ago, I saw that one of my favorite bands, Fun., would be playing a concert in June in Paris. I immediately texted my brother and said, "Dude! Fun. is playing in France!" To which he naturally responded, "Dude! You have to go!" It was already sold out, but as I was looking at the website, I also saw a familiar date on their tour schedule: my birthday. Not only were they playing a concert on my birthday, but they were playing it in Geneva, Switzerland. When I told my brother, he pestered me (as most brothers do) to get tickets and go.  He then proceeded to tell my parents when he saw them that a wonderful birthday gift would be tickets to this show. My mom texted me and asked if I wanted tickets, to which I exclaimed, "Are you kidding me?!" I told two of my friends about the concert, and they were interested, so on my birthday, we packed up the car and drove to Geneva!

The ticket said the festival started at 7, therefore we arrived around 5 to get a good parking spot (or at least within walking distance of the festival).  When received booklets upon entering with all of the information for the day's festivities only to find that Fun. wasn't playing until 10. Alas, alack, we'd wait.  After a fabulous dinner of different bruschetta, we waited for the first group (which was not my particular cup of tea) to start on the secondary stage and it started raining. Thank goodness we had thought to bring umbrellas! One benefit of festivals like this is that there are always people handing out free things, including backpacks with earplugs and ponchos.  Decked out in white plastic, still hiding under our umbrellas, the first group finished, the clouds parted, and a jazz-ish singer came out.  She was pretty good, and my French friend was loving actually knowing the words to the music. I paid no attention to the third group as they sounded a bit like this, and I was getting too antsy for Fun.  We were pretty close to the stage, surrounded by junior highers and teeny boppers (do people still use that term?) and my friends asked to move back a bit so we wouldn't be surrounded by jumping screaming fans.  I agreed that it was dreadful, and so we moved back, still close to the stage though, and little did we all know that I would be one of those screamer-jumper fans. Whoops.

Nate Ruess is one of the most ridiculously energetic performers I have ever seen, and every moment of the concert was worth it. About halfway through, the rain started POURING again, so everyone just put on their ponchos and hoods and kept on jumping singing along.  At one point, Nate came down form the stage (covered, by the way) to see how hard it was raining, got soaked, and kept on singing. They were all so fantastic.

The next day, we went to downtown Geneva and walked along the lake and in the parks and stopped off for some Starbucks, naturally.  When I get my pictures uploaded, I'll post a few.  We got back home in the afternoon, leaving me enough time to make a cake to go along with dinner with my British family and my other American family.  They brought KFC and we started watching Singin' in the Rain, one of my favorite movies, and had a lovely time.  We took a break part way through the film for cake and that was interrupted by the doorbell.  I was worried for a minute that the neighbors were coming to say that we were making too much noise, but no, it was actually a group of friends from church! I opened the door and I was surrounded by lovely people singing Happy Birthday.  They had also brought a few cakes themselves! We never did finish the movie, but it turned out better anyway!