Catching up with June (in July!)

A popular squre, filled with diners waiting for night to fall, on the longest day of the year...

We're moving. A week in Arles. Fête de la Musique!

All that happening, and no recent blog! So, let's start with that last item... 

Poster for the event!

Fête de la Musique

Every year on the Summer Solstice, June 21, France celebrates music and its creation with a Fête de la Musique. Different communities celebrate in different ways, with big cities usually offering large concerts, and small towns perhaps just a few musicians playing in the town square.

We’ve attended this festival, oh, maybe four or five times in Montpellier. There are some public concerts, and individuals are encouraged to get out and make music in the streets. We enjoy wandering through the city, seeing, and hearing, the many aspects and individual interpretations of music. 

A view through the city gate.

As evening falls, people gather and the music picks up!

One guy with a guitar; a duo on drums and keyboard; a choral group performing sacred chants in a former church; a Latin-beat jazz band in the newly-opened band shell on the Esplanade. Or, the crazy costumes and antics of a brass band, known as a Fanfare. And then, finally, as we make our way home through the increasingly boisterous crowds, a wanta-be rocker playing out her pop-star fantasies with her band on a street corner.

The newly-opened band shell on the Esplanade.

Or, maybe, our least-favorite, a DJ with a stack of speakers, the pounding beat echoing through the narrow stone streets and wiping out any other music for blocks around.

But static photos don't explain much.  To get a better feel for the evening, here's a quick video summarizing our wanderings...

If the video clip does't work, try this link:    https://youtu.be/fWufEItyJB0

And the beat goes on, late into the night.

A New Apartment

And, yes, we're moving! After more than five years in our apartment, we suddenly got word that the owner was moving back in. Certainly her right, but sad for us; we arrived in this apartment during the COVID lockdown, and it has been our refuge ever since.

We were given three months to find another place. But we've witnessed, and helped, other expats find apartments in this, the fastest-growing city in France, and it can be brutal. So we got on it right away, and discovered another couple in an apartment in the same complex who were also moving—and looking for someone to rent their apartment!

We were thrilled to be staying in the same area, they were thrilled to have found a tenant so quickly. They may be gone only a year, which means we may be moving again sooner than we’d like. But we have NO interest in making this move a long, drawn-out process.

Plus, we already have plans for the summer… it’s vacation time! It’s hot and humid; we wanna get out of town, not spend frustrating weeks looking at apartments! So, we’ll be moving—just up the street—on the 15th!

The thing is, we already had plans. It's a busy time! Right now we’re in Arles, a historic city about an hour’s drive away, supporting our daughter Nina who is exhibiting at the annual photographic festival here.  (The Off Festival; click here...)

We leave Arles on Sunday; get the keys to our new place on Tuesday (Monday is Bastille Day, a major national holiday); our former landlady gets her place back on Friday (so we have three days to clear out and clean up!). 

Then, Monday we’re scheduled to leave to spend a month or so in the Jura mountains, just west of the Swiss border.

Will we make it? I’m sure there will be a future blog about it!