La Tene Festival

The Scottish Ceilidh band that I'm in played at the La Tene festival around Neuchatel. According to wikipedia La Tene is an iron age culture. The festival was very fascinating and there was tons of crafts, furs, iron and stone tools.

We got to the festival very early before all the crowds and first we watched the stone crafters. As well as carving stones there were demonstrations of flint knapping.

There were also kids who were carving the stones and they were really interested and serious about their work. This one kid was copying what he had seen the adults do and was very serious about it.

Next up was the basketweaving.

And onto the blacksmith. We watched the man work an iron tool, in a manner similar to how they continue to fit horse shoes today.

Also they had a demonstration of casting, metals poured into molds made of sand or clay.

The blacksmith was a confident man working in bare feet!!

Also at the festival they had a large battle, with all the swords and spears. There were people walking around the encampment all day with fantastic costumes.

And we sat eating our lunch watching the fighting.

And they also had the children get into it.

When I make a tent it's going to have these on the poles. Not really my regular lion.

All the structures at the festival were made of wood and hides and for the people who were dressed up even their shoes were period (or at least looked pretty different).

Later in the festival I also tried throwing a spear, with little success, it didn't go very far so there's no worry of violence from me.

Performing at this festival was fantastic. We had a very nice green room to leave out stuff before the show, it had couches and a fridge filled with water, pop and wine. The entire setup was very professional with a good soundcheck and they had the fancy rock concert lights that move around and change colours. There was even a fog machine to give an atmospheric effect! That was pretty distracting when trying to read the music though!

Our audience was very enthusiastic and very big. It was a fantastic crowd and they were all very excited and cheering and getting into the dancing (we had a caller).

When the show ended we were cheered back onto the stage for an encore. All in all, a tremendous amount of fun.

Then it was back to Lausanne, lucky me got a car ride back and practiced my French too.

I will hopefully have pictures from the festival later to post.