Bastille Day!!!

So I missed America's independence day but fortunately I was here for France's independence day which is called Bastille day. It has been held every July 14th since 1880 and is really more of a symbolic date then the day they actually won their independence. As I was told by a tour guide July 14th is the day the French started a revolution against Louis the 16th and Marie Antoinette. They marched and burned down the queens palace but were squashed by the army. France did gain it's independence from the kings a couple years later but were in such chaos that the person to rise to power was France's greatest military leader of the time Napoleon. After Napoleon lost a couple wars and was sent into exile and French longed for the days of their kings and revived the monarchy and it wasn't till 1848 did France start electing their presidents.
Bastille Day though is a military show where the armed forces present themselves to the President and parade down the Champs-Elysees showing off all their military prowess.

I was invited by a couple of the other interns from work to go see the parade with them. We got there at 8:30 and stuff was supposed to start happening around 9. We were in the second row and had an excellent view but we were apparently not in the right spot for seeing things like the commanders presenting honors to the President so it appeared like not much was happening till almost 10:30 when they did a flypast of 53 different airplanes, and later there would be 35 helicopters.

Then they had around 38  different "dismounted troops" in varying levels of ridiculous uniforms.

And they finished up with "motorized troops"

 These are just a handful of the hundreds of different vehicles and uniforms I saw. It was actually a lot of fun and I was excited to see how another country celebrates it's independence day.