We’ve spent a lot of time in the last couple of weeks prepping our new rental house before we move in. A friend of ours says “if a place looks clean, it may be clean, but if it looks dirty, it’s filthy!” That adage certainly applies to rental houses. This one looked pretty clean, but really was not. Once you start scrubbing stained grout on your hands and knees and releasing the smell of dirty feet and old cooking grease, you can’t stop until it’s done and actually clean. The good news is that our new place is now ready, our new bed has been delivered and set up, and we are packing up our apartment! Tomorrow is move-in day, with an expected high of 99 degrees. But then we will be home!
In between the cleaning and yet another heat wave, we’ve had some fun exploring Angers and building local friendships.
It was another very warm day last Thursday, but we went to an outdoor evening concert in the garden of the “Musée des Beaux-Arts” (Angers’ fine arts museum). An interesting thing about France is that everywhere we go, we hear American music being played, in English, and this concert was no exception — all songs the band played were in English. It’s no wonder that the younger generation in France often speak English pretty well. English is currently taught in school for four years, and they hear lots of music sung in English.
On Friday, we visited the “David d’Angers Gallery” which showcases the incredible bronze work of Pierre-Jean David, a French sculptor and artist from Angers. The gallery in the former abbey of church in Angers is stunning, having been restored in 1984 after being long abandoned as a result of the collapse of its roof.
While we found the work of this sculptor to be incredibly good, it’s clear that his benefactors paid him to use his talents to spread propaganda of that time (his own thoughts on the matters depicted are unknown), with many carved murals showing how the French were “helping” the people they’d colonized in Africa and island nations. There were murals depicting the same type of images of the enslavement of Africans brought to the West against their will and the colonization of indigenous peoples in the Americas, showing them as being “benevolently educated” and “civilized” by their colonizers. We found it impossible to put aside this disgusting and dehumanizing revisionist history even as we appreciated the art.
We visited a botanical garden in the middle of the city, the “Jardins des Plantes d’Angers,” which was a lovely place to stroll and pass an hour in the cool morning on Saturday.
We were invited over to some friends’ house Monday to beat the heat in their air conditioned house with a mix of French and Americans friends. We ate all afternoon, drank wine, swapped stories, and got recommendations for things like an English-speaking dentist, how to pass the French driving test (getting a French drivers license is horrendously difficult, and all parts must be done completely in French, which is fair, but so HARD), how to navigate the French health care system, and more.
Lastly, yesterday we submitted our application to join the French health care system. Fingers crossed, it works. It’s been quite a week!