We are settling in to French life. Wait, you say, you have been living in France for over two years, aren’t you already settled? In one sense, yes we are, as far as knowing how things work, or too often don’t work here. Yet, where we have been living in La Thebauderie we are surrounded by English speaking neighbors, all 10 of them. We can completely survive without ever speaking French, or having interactions with local folks. So the French life of living in a community has been missing.

We are spending three weeks in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris. We came here to sell our car, which only took one day. This is not a place tourists come to, so we are interacting with France in a different way. Our one bedroom apartment has a nice outside area, just across from une pharmacie which you can see in this sketch I did on the deck.

Wednesday we took a bus to the La Défense station where we caught a Metro into Paris for Tricia’s appointment with the eye doctor. I sketched people while I waited.

Yesterday was a great day, the kind I have wanted since coming to France. We walked the eight minutes to the market that is open three or four days a week.

Shrimp, small potatoes, and asparagus made a great lunch, so great that I failed to take a photo. We also picked up Provençal olives, olives wrapped in anchovies for me, some eggplant dip, strawberries, and blueberries.

I am doing more sketching in Procreate on my iPad. A few years ago the stack of sketchbooks was becoming intimidating, I felt I would need a storage unit just to keep them all, so I started sketching on my iPad and I loved it, I still do. Here are a few from this week.

For many years I had an Etsy shop where people bought prints of my sketches, moving here that was not practical any longer. This week I started looking into making printable art files available, I would love to hear any thoughts you might have on the subject, not the tech side but if you think there would be interest.

I hope your journeys are going well, today ours might be to just go to the restaurant in the building we are in to have sushi, not a great distance but a journey nonetheless.