Five Senses in Angers (JL)

Still on my honeymoon

Living in France has not really struck me yet. It is my first time out of the country and I have still yet to register the whole "being in a foreign country" aspect of the honeymoon phase. This hasn't stopped me from marveling at every old building I see or staring at each street sign that doesn't make sense to me. I took this picture on my walk to school on the very morning after I arrived. I live quite a distance from my university (~45 minutes on foot), but I am slowly mastering the art of public transportation and timing each stop perfectly so that I can get to school in about 20 minutes. The most beautiful thing about this picture is that the rising sun is the same sun that rises around the rest of the world. Now, am I poetic yet? 

I was stricken by the awe and beauty of nature, even in the heart of this little city. I remembered how we depend on the sun's light, yet take it for granted almost every day. As I walk to school in the morning, I am getting used to the rising sun marking my home stretch and school laying just before me. 

Sight

In addition to the rising sun, another sight I have been noticing around the town is everything being so old. To me, this is one of the greatest things about France. In the United States, the oldest thing you are bound to bump into comes from ~1776, whereas in France, the history of a simple fallen wall (pictured left) extends far beyond the entirety of the colonized United States. Seeing raw history like this ancient, crumbling doorway strikes me down and makes me wish that walls could talk, so that I could comprehend its entire history. Sites like this one I pass every day and stop to take them in, so it makes me sad to see the French natives walking by this without a second glance on their way to the clothing store. You can find old buildings, towering cathedrals, and ancient remnants of a time long past on most streets, if you know where to look. Most of the time what you seek lays just before you, but it is harder to know what you see than to see what you know.

Sound 

I use this picture of medieval, biblical tapestries for my sense of sound because I visited the Château d'Angers during my first week here and discovered these truly stunning works of art by listening as they told a story. Well, I actually played tourist and bought an audio guide so I could understand everything that was being described in them, but nonetheless a story was told to me! There are 75 surviving tapestries of a 90 piece set, and they are the largest (over 800 square meters in total) tapestries of their age (650-700 years old). But why sound? Sound because I listened to the audio guide tell me about each tapestry. It told me to pay attention to the stitching and the colors of certain images, in addition to understanding the whole picture. Without the audio guide, one can hear these tapestries telling their story. It is mostly silent, but that tranquil, secret history is exactly what I have been searching for since I arrived only 12 days ago. Most of what you can find around Angers is part of a more ancient epoch, mingled with the everyday shops and artisan bakeries you would find on the streets of any city. However, I do believe that it is necessary to stop, breathe, and listen to the story told in the most silent places of this beautiful city because its walls and streets breathe history, and one cannot appreciate living somewhere else if he or she doesn't know something about where it came from.

Smell

Angers smells like a more used version of Meadville. That is to say the air is dry, polluted, and the city is filled with smokers. Angers is also five times the size of Meadville, so that is almost expected. These smells, while not the most pleasant, certainly make it much more intoxicating when passing by a café in the morning selling fresh baguettes and sweet croissants or even walking though a department store with hundreds of scents of perfumes and colognes. The air also has a different scent depending on the time of day, in my opinion. See, I live a good 45 minutes walk from the centre-ville (center of town) and just beyond my host family's backyard is the French countryside.

I had an existential moment whilst taking in the scene so much that I needed to take a picture and show everyone I knew. The first thing I noticed when I stepped outside was the crispness of the air. It doesn't look like it, but the temperature was just barely above freezing and I could see a wisp of breath after each exhalation. My attention was drawn to the sun and its beauty, and to that I don't have many more words because pictures can do it no justice. My brief revelation was halted when I noticed an incinerator smokestack (center left) sticking out like a sore thumb in the midst of all this, and my first reaction was to take a deep breath to see if it had tainted the air. It had not. I saw this as a silent struggle between nature and man; while humans attempt to make everyday products more efficient and destroying those things inferior, we often forget about our home, the Earth, and dump millions of metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere anyway. However, on this morning mother nature had won by doing nothing but existing. All I could smell were the trees, the coolness of the air, and a morning breeze. Nature: 1   Humans: 0   (on the scoreboard for better smells)

 

Taste

It would not be the true French experience if I didn't try some cheese! Cheese has by far been the best tasting food since I arrived. I indulge myself with a bit of cheese only for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack times. I remember writing a 6 page paper (in French) on cheese for the FS201 French seminar final paper. It should also be noted that the topic was of my own choosing, and if that doesn't sway you that I really really like my cheese, then you should know that in the photo above that is the cheese that I bought for this week. The taste of Brebis du Pays-Basque, Camembert de Normandie, Vache, and the most famous Brie de Meaux symbolise signifies the taste of France. France is one of those places I had always imagined having a taste to go with it, and it has long been cheese for me.

Touch

I do not know whether or not all of the cats I see at every odd hour are stray cats or house cats who wander the neighborhood 24/7, but there are a lot of them and they love to be pet. At first, I was wary about touching a random animal in a foreign country, but I didn't have to dumb that down very much to reassure myself about petting the furry creature doing a figure 8 between my legs. French cats have broken all stereotypes I have heard about cats, and it works about the same way with the people here as well, minus the weaving between your legs. Stereotypes in France haven't been very prominent at all, as I had imagined they would be. However, you will still see every other third person carrying a baguette after the Saturday morning market and that will always bring a smile to my face.







Until next time, bloggers! I have many more adventures to participate in before my next blog. Bon chance et à bientôt!