Bigoudènes

Thom’s first experience of Quimper today, and to be completely honest, it was pretty magical. We stumbled upon a festival of Brittany right in the centre-ville and wandered round the market, listening to the Breton music and eating some gorgeous strawberries. The sun was shining, the company was great, and everything was just perfect.

Heading more into the centre of town, we soon found ourselves surrounded by bigoudènes and their dancing partners. These are of course my picture for today! The story behind these headdresses seems to change between tellers, and the only things that seem to run true in all stories is that the headdress is different for each town or area, and have become taller and more elaborately decorated as the years have gone on. So, a woman wearing one is named a bigoudène,and there are also a lot of different dances and costumes dpending on the area! Some say it also has something to do with King Louis XIV, and a sign of rebellion against the king, but others dismiss this as an old tale. Anyways, back to our day! So we were just exploring the rather narrow city streets when we all found ourselves surrounded by dancing people…so we had to follow them for a while until I could get a good enough photograph.

Home for dinner, then we watched ‘Life of Pi’. What can I say? Be careful, spoilers ahead. Also, apologies if you liked the film – I think that neither of us were arty enough to enjoy it fully. So, here goes:-

Film review: Kid for whatever reason manages to escape shipwreck and ends up falling in love with tiger. Sort of like Forrest Gump, but less action. Probably could have condensed the entire film into ten minutes, and in fact, we were kind of praying that the tiger would eat the main character without further ado. We pretty much only continued to watch said film as we wanted to make sure that the tiger survived. Direct quote from Thom as the film finished - “But where was the tiger poo!?” I think that pretty much sums up our enjoyment of the film. Maybe it was just too meaningful for the two of us…even though of course we did understand that the animals were meant to be representations of people etc.