Thonon les Bains

Today is the 2nd Sunday we're here, and since last weekend we stayed in town, this time we decided to rent a car and explore the area a bit.
We drove down the lakefront road on the same side of the lake as our apartment (bottom part if you look at the map below). The next big town on the lake was Thonon les Bains. It's about 45 miles from GVA. Here's a map... Thonon is in France, not Switzerland.

The town is kind of built into the cliff sloping down towards Lac Leman. We parked the car on top and decided to explore the town on foot. Here's the view we got from the top.

We walked down a super steep path to the center where we could hear people, music etc. We took a walk down the pier which you can see from the picture above. I think Thonon is still an active fishing town as we saw some cages and nets drying by the docks.

I saw thiis sign in one of the windows, so I wonder if they catch the fish to eat or...

Anywho... here are some views of Thonon from the bottom of the hill by the lake.

While we were there the big cruise boat from Geneva pulled up to the pier and let some people off. That's definitely on our to do list - take a big boat cruise on the lake.

After that we headed towards all the music and noise coming from a nice beachy plaza nearby. This is how local people do beach theme. Live in a cold climate and can't get palm trees to grow? Plant some cool knobby trees in the sand instead! Love it!

All the colorful umbrellas are outdoor seating areas for the restaurants which line the street.
It was time for lunch so we went from one place to another till we found one that looked promising. We found a great spot to sit facing the street and the umbrellas.
Great people watching, it turned out!
I am very proud so say that I ordered our lunch and free water all in French. Now before everyone starts making fun of me, let me just say getting free water here is no easy task. If you ask for water, they will ask if you want still of with gas, and then bring out a bottle and charge you up to 5CHF for it. Rip off in my book.
I asked around and apparently you have to ask for Carafe d'Eau, and you'll get some sort of a carafe, pitcher (or old wine bottle) full of simple tap water. Cost = Zero! Yea!

While we were waiting for our food to come out we saw this guy dart out of the restaurant next door, make a loop around the sandy plaza and come back.

What the heck? We'll there was a group of loud guys with him and every so often they would run out into the street, stop the traffic and toss this huge box turned die in the air and based on what number ended on top they made the poor guy do a dare. We quickly realized this was the local Bachelor Party!! So funny. The poor guy was dressed in a ski coat, boots, had skis strapped on, a computer keyboard on his neck (WHAAA?) and at some point even a "computer monitor" box on his head... Excuse the quality of photos...

One of the dares was for the dude to drink shots out of a female manequin's leg. Hilarious.

This went on for a while, and then they finished drinking, packed their stuff and left, the poor bachelor behind them on his skis and computer box on his head... So funny!

This goes to show you that regardless of your country and culture boys will be boys, and the end of bachelorhood is celebrated with lots of booze and crazy, rowdy partying.