Livre en Folie

May 30^th is a holiday in Haiti. It is Fete Dieu or God’s Holiday. I don’t know how it started (or anything at all about it) but there is a tradition to have a festival called Livre en Folie (Crazy for Books). They gather many authors to be available at the Sugar Cane Plantation (there is a museum and park) to sign their works. They  (I don’t know who ‘they’ is) also have many many books for sale that are discounted and evidently well worth it from the number of people that were there. Nadege took me along since she was going with her friend. After running some other errands we were on our way. The traffic was crazy around the Plantation so we parked and walked to the entrance…the line was at least 3 blocks long (as though I know what a block is really but still). This gathering must be really popular! We finally got inside and in order to anything there were more lines (of course) but nothing was straight forward…there were different tents where you could buy the books and you had to be at the right tent to get specific books and you would stand in line to get a paper that said you could get a book, another line to pay for the book, another line to pick the book up, then you would go to find the author if he or she was at the festival…we ended up not buying any books (kind of sad but not really). Getting food from the stand was the same way…one place to pay for your order and get your receipt which you then had to move to another place to turn the receipt in before they would serve you. I’m curious to know if it was that crowded all day long (we were a bit late) but as we were leaving there were still very long lines to get in and it was advertised to close in 30 minutes…I guess it was a Haitian 30 minutes?