Fete de la Musique

Sunday in Parc des Bastions we finally managed to find proof of the existence of Fete de la Musique, the weekend long festival that takes place across Geneva. The website for the Fete lists dozens of performers at dozens of venues, but the one near us, in Grottes, was not to be found when we went searching for the 2.30 performance on Sunday afternoon. We wasted a good 45 minutes in not finding the venue, the website directions were completely useless, and whilst we strolled through Grottes, with our ears pricked, we couldn't detect the slightest squeak of music.
We gave up on finding something to watch near to us, and with no idea what we might see we jumped on a bus to Parc des Bastions and spilled with the hundreds of other people into the park.
Where, from looking at the website I could at least be confident that we would find something to watch.  The website indicated four different stages were in the park. We only noticed two but probably because we really liked what we saw on on the second stage. The first stage we come across had a hip hop act on it, in French the music was actually really good, although  I had to chuckle at hearing MCing in French, the diction sounded so good. We decided it was all a bit loud for the little one, so we went to find something else.
 It seems that whenever something is going on in the city all the "national association" in Geneva people all turn out. Near the middle of the park we wandered through a little village of gazebos with delicious smells emanating from under their canvas roofs. Delicious smells from all sides, I can remember seeing Peru and Paraguay for sure, though it seemed there were plenty of other places going on what we could smell.
We stood in the crowd with the girls on our shoulders watching a group with a wild variety of instruments.  The big one eventually decided sitting on Daddy's shoulders was no way to enjoy the music and had to get down on the floor to facilitate the required jumping up and down.
We watched for about two hours from around 4, when we decided it would be a good idea to get a beer and some food. We had samosas and a kofta kebab, presumably from the Indian association in Geneva, but I never saw the sign. Beer as well, and the girls were able to run around on the grass in front of the Uni library whilst we ate.
The area near Parc des Bastions is really good for buses. The Cirque bus stop, which is actually three bus stops all with the same name, is not all that far away from Place Neuve, so if you can't find something in the immediate vicinity of the park, it's a good idea to look over there. The buses that go through it seem to head in all directions. As we wandered over to catch a bus back home we happened to walk past a building behind the Geneva Conservatoire, with a bunch of people spilling out of it, clearly having finished viewing an afternoon performance of something classical. Brilliantly the Fete de la Musique makes no discrimination about type of music, so over the weekend it was possible to see latin, classical, dance, something called Ethno, which I think is the same as world, HipHop, the list went on for a while. Whilst it makes no discrimination about type of music, I would say it may make a discrimination about quality, for the little that we saw and heard was excellent.
Sadly the advertising for the FdlM was pretty low key, without a Genevoise friend of mine pointing out that it was going on, and that my kids might enjoy it, we would never have known about it. The Tribune de Geneve ran an entire supplement about it, which was hardly likely to catch my attention - I only read the TdG when I'm waiting for kebabs or other fast food. Despite the endless billboards that clutter the city I noticed nothing on those in the last few weeks and I am fairly assiduous at farming ideas for things to do from these billboards, so I'm  confident I wouldn't have missed the ads if they were out there. Lastly of course the website was only in French, which makes it tricky for me, and curiously bad and user unfriendly, which is inexcusable.
Thankfully the music, when we got there, more than made up for the inconvenience of having no idea that the thing was taking place - if only we could have got there sooner.