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Published: June 19th 2008
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So Annecy started out quite badly, with us having to call all our reservations and try to push them back because the French train strike will keep us from heading out to Nice today, and with us wandering the town for a couple hours before finding our hostel on the top of a hill in the rain :< However, after waking up, the city more than mde up for the bad start.
Annecy is known as France’s Venice, due to its being built on the edge of a canal, and the comparison is pretty accurate. The buildings have the same colorful and crowded feeling on the edge of the water. However, the comparison is really only true for the part of town right on the canal. After that, it becomes more of a mountain/lake town like Interlaken.
We started the day walking down the hill (steep, but far easier without lugging our luggage) to the old town. This is where it most resembles (a somewhat wider) Venice. The lake leads into a canal which splits into two at the site of the old prison, which looks like a small castle. We walked up to the top of the old
town, through a bajillion restaurants and birds, to a chateau musee, which I guess is a palace museum cuz that’s what it looked like. It, like much of this town, is centered around animation.
Apparently we arrived during the Annecy animation festival, which, according to some of the many film people staying in our hostel, is the largest animation film festival in the world. Guess Siggraph doesn’t count. Turned out to be a fun thing though. Everywhere we turned there was something celebrating animation. Even at the library, where we went to email the next couple hostels due to the stupid French train debacle, there were a bunch of displays on animation.
We went back down to walk the waterfront, where there was a park with about million film students lounging waiting for their film events. It was a nice and sunny day at this point, so we walked slowly and enjoyed the scenery. The park was flooded from the night before, and in the midst of the temporary lakes there was a site with just bout every flag you can think of, right next to a stage which would play host to the most blasphemous thing you’ve
ever heard of. I’ll talk about that later.
We headed back to the train station to check on our trains for the next day, and then ate some Genuine French Quiche before wandering the town some more. The place was definitely fun to walk around in. We found a cat which I pet for a bit before its owners came along, and while they seemed okay with my attention on the cat, since I can’t speak the language I played it safe I have yet to find a genuinely unfriendly ct in Europe, which might be largely due to the apparent lack of pound services (ie basically cat-killing) in Europe. I approve.
We walked through a garden with “living art”, plants twisted into strange shapes, before doing something I had wanted to do ever since getting into Europe—boating on the water. Brent and I rented a paddle boat and went out to explore an island and watch party boats on the water. We considered trying to make it to the other side, but wouldn’t you know it—the rain came in. What else is new, right? The boat renter waved us in, charged us a very reasonable fraction
of the quoted cost, and we headed back to the hostel.
We decided to camp out at the hostel to do laundry and just generally veg. We played cards and listened to music, and Brent managed to turn just about every item of clothing he had pink. Luckily we’re in France, right? He’ll blend in 😉 We finished up around 8 and went out to eat. We went for some crepes. I decided to try a crepe with what it said was steak, cheese and tomato. What it ended up being was amazing. A half-cooked hamburger patty (yes, not just meat, but a patty) slapped in the middle of a wheat crepe with American (read: plastic) cheese and salsa. I did not enjoy. When the waiter came by to ask if it was good, this was the first time I couldn’t bring myself to squeeze out a false yes. I made up for it with some pear ice cream though, which was good even though it didn’t come with a crepe (another case of misunderstanding the menu).
We went and sat outside the theater, where we planned to watch a 3-hour series of short student animated films at
11pm. We sat I the park with the million or so flags and suffered through 30 minutes or so of French Jazz (oh geez…), before heading in and watching some fun advertising clips on the screens inside.
We finally got to buy our tickets, and headed in to wait with literally a thousand people, mostly the artsy film type (which was fun for the small amount of time) from all over the world. And when we actually got in to see the films, I really, really enjoyed myself. Some of the films were boring or genuinely bad, but many were fun and a few were awesome. And the crowd was REALLY excited, involved and LOUD, and also threw the largest assortment of paper airplanes you could ever see at the stage in huge numbers and would cheer whenever one made it on.
My favorite was probably the first one, called “My Happy End”, where it explains how a dog’s life changes once he catches his tail. It was doubly great because the animation was done by drawing characters on sheets of paper, cutting them out and setting them out in real life 3D, changing their shape and ink
frame by frame incredibly smoothly. Some very clever jokes were made off of this technique.
The reminder of the worthwhile films that I can remember days later (when I finally got around to writing this) are as follows:
-A story of metamorphosis in life and music using a dark form of the South Park piecewise paper animation, which was Russian and very aware of it.
-An Israeli story about a young girl’s unprofessed love (boring, but cute)
A Canadian story about a man and his suicidal love for Key Lime Pie with Sin city-style art.
-A Swiss story about a bell-ringer in a belltower who ends up sending a small town completely randomly mad due to his missing a single ring while he pursued his love interest, which had really cool Paper Mario-style animation.
-An extremely well-animated French CG piece about a pair of lovebird octopi who end up saving one another (multiple times) from their would-be mealmaker in clever ways.
-A sad Korean story about an abused young girl who coped by caring for her doll as she would like to be cared for.
I very much enjoyed the film screening.
After the films at 2:30
AM, we walked back to the hostel, dreading the next day since we had to wake up to catch a train at 7:30 AM after carrying our fifty metric tons of stuff through the entire city to the station. Yeah. Wish us luck : ).
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CL
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Lake show in August
There is also a great show on the lake the first week-end of August. Hope you are still there. Christian Loriau