I find myself posting less these days, not because there aren’t good and interesting things happening — there are, in fact we are working on a couple of new things that we’ll share soon.

I think this is happening because living in France has become less like a “what adventure are we going to have today?” life and more like just a regular life. I think that’s a good thing overall, as keeping up the pace of a “vacation life” is exhausting, and sometimes you just want to lay around and stream some shows while the leaves turn and fall outside.

Over the past week, some cool things have happened:

• Greg took a long bike ride with his friend (see photo above of yet another lovely French village called Grez-Neuville) and I took a long walk with my friend, all on a beautiful afternoon — fall has been gorgeous and temperate in Angers
• We’ve been trying to replicate one of our favorite meals in the U.S. and this week we got it close, after many attempts
• Our language classes and French conversation group sessions are progressing and we’re doing pretty well at keeping up
• We’ve got our heat and heated towel warmers working thanks to a visit from our exceedingly helpful landlords
• Our dishwasher was fixed by a highly entertaining technician with pretty good English who gave us a great lesson in practical household French while he was here
• We’ve received an invitation for another wonderful dinner soirée at our French friend’s house for this weekend
• We got our annual vaccinations this week, flu and COVID for me, and just flu for Greg as he got his COVID shot when we were in the U.S. in September. For the three shots we got between us, we paid a total of €48 without healthcare system access. Contrast that with the $140 Greg paid for his COVID vaccine in the U.S. without health insurance.

And the best thing of this week, Greg got his letter of acceptance into the French healthcare system! I’m still waiting on mine, but considering we’ve made the same applications, and sent all the same documents that were re-requested a few weeks ago on the same day, I’m hopeful mine is in the mail too.

The theme of this week for me has been that France continues to be a great place to actually live and the people are incredibly warm and helpful. The bureaucracy is bending our way, for now, and we can only hope it continues.