Apartments and Leopold

I thought I would post a few pics of my apartment. Its been treating us well, except for the bathroom renovation thing. HOpefully that will be wrapped pretty soon. Unfortunately whoever cleaned up the communal bathroom threw out all of our soap, towels and toilet paper for some reason, so that's our crisis of the day for now. Unfortunately I'm the only bona fide French speaker living here, so I think our landlord really dislikes me at this point since I'm always calling him up and pestering him about this thing or that thing. Overall i think that our apartment is on the crummier end of the apartments I've seen here, but decent for the money, location, and fact that we saved by moving in a week early.

I went to the museum of Africa the other day. Very cool in a history geek kind of way, since they've hardly changed it since the 1960s, and even that was just a minor update on the 1930s edition. It was built buy King Leopold (not quite as bad as Hitler) the IInd to "showcase the potential of Africa" to the Belgian public. It has all sorts of vaguely horrific statues built in to it, with benevolent white folk reading to African children, the natives' mating rituals and such. THe interesting part is that in all of the oldest school parts, they've up little explanatory plaques talking about the museumology, ethnographic thinking, and so on that explains the forumalation of the displays. Also, all of the taxonomic models are totally falling apart and shedding their fur and scales and so on (there's an animals of Africa hall). They set up a brief display in the middle about the colonial era, which I thought was fairly well done in its explanation of the Belgian activity there, but has still apparently been criticized for whitewashing a bit. I can see that too, although it at least acknowledges a lot of what was going on. I think that most of this is in aid of saving money, not appeasing historians, but I thought it was very interesting.