We’re now three weeks into our year in France and our stay in Orléans. Adventures always bring unexpected learning experiences and gratitude to our lives. Here are some things that we’ve learned about during our stay in France that have been less than ideal:

• Clothes dryers are a rare thing here and we miss them deeply. There is nothing like a fluffy towel straight from the dryer and I will never take that for granted again. Here, we are lucky to have a washer and have to hang everything to dry. Washers are usually in the kitchen or bathroom for water drainage purposes, and there is no good way to retrofit ancient homes for dryer venting. While we’ve always hung some items of clothing in our laundry room in the U.S., we have to hang everything here. Towels and sheets end up feeling like stiff cardboard and we spend so much time moving things around on the drying rack to get them to dry faster. Forget doing more than one load a day!
• Medicine is tightly controlled. We can only buy 15 or 20 ibuprofen at one time, dispensed by a pharmacy from behind the counter. Same with other normal meds that come in giant pill bottles at Costco in the U.S. like vitamins, benedryl, and melatonin. If we were to pack for this trip again, we would have opted to bring more of those rather than trying to make our travel pharmacy small and light.
• Showers in Europe seem to come in two main frustrating styles:
  • Ones that are essentially bathtubs with a shower head on a hose that you have to hold in your hand, and not fixed in a holder on the wall, that when you set it down to lather up, you freeze (we have this)
  • Ones that get the whole bathroom wet because they generally don’t use shower curtains, but have a little swinging door that does little to keep the water in (see photo)

• Coffee proportions:
  • We love coffee! As long-time Seattle-ites, we have historically drank coffee like it was a whole separate food group. We want a mug of coffee to sip and savor. Here, coffee is mainly tiny espressos and trying to order an Americano gets you strange looks and mediocre results. Greg ordered a coffee with breakfast in Paris the other day and said he wanted a double coffee, a very big “grand” coffee that caused the baristas to need a team meeting behind the bar to figure out how to get him a big enough coffee. I was sure it was going to come in a bowl. He ended up with a double shot Americano, not all that big, but he rolled with it.

These are really small things though, things to experience and navigate while trying to live like a local in a French apartment. They are minor irritants that are generally more than made up for in the things that are great:

• The baked goods are incredible!
• We never get tired of looking at the sights and beautiful old buildings in France
• Public transportation is fast, cheap, clean, and on-time
• The people have been incredibly nice and patient with our attempts to speak French. We’re generally able to handle most shopping and ordering in French now, albeit a bit clunkily. In the last week, we’ve had two heartwarming situations happen:
  • Greg went out for a bike ride and stopped at our favorite neighborhood bakery to pick up something on the way home. He didn’t want to leave his bike outside unattended and popped his head in to ask if he could bring his bike in with him (it was empty at that time). A young lady working at the bakery came outside and stood with his bike while he went in to order because she didn’t want him to be worried about it.
  • At the Saturday Market this week, we stopped at our favorite bakery there where the same lady waits on us each time in French, politely correcting or confirming our French pronunciations (yes, I know there is a strong bakery theme here to our shopping). She wanted us to know that they are not going to be there next weekend because they are going to be on holiday so she called over another lady who has a bit of English to confirm we understood. We wished them “bonnes vacances” (have a good vacation)!

We’re off tomorrow for a mini-road trip in a rented car:

• Wednesday: the towns of Chateaudun and Chartres which have chateaux and charming old townsquares
• Thursday: the towns of Blois and Beaugency for more chateaux and charming old towns
• Friday: the Costco in Paris – we’re hoping for samples and cheap gas!