Today is the first day in the past few weeks when we slept enough and almost did not feel tired right after breakfast. Our move to France happened on April’s Fools Day, and there couldn’t be a more proper day for us

Several weeks before the move were filled with finishing all sorts of unfinished tasks and tying lots of loose ends. There are still some Dutch things to finalize, but that’s not critical anymore.

Our first full day in France started with my wife getting her laptop at the office and checking several apartments, one of which may become our permanent house for the upcoming years.

This night was quite unlike the last days in the Netherlands, when we’ve been packing and sorting until 2 AM only to wake up 4 hours later in order to have breakfast before the movers come (Covid routines, not being in the same room with them, all that stuff). We went to bed at 19:00 and woke up at around 9:00. One more sleep like that, and we may have a chance not to feel like zombies anymore.

This morning I went to a nearby boulangerie with a solid intention to say: «Bon jour! Deux café au lait, s’il vous plaît» and then «Hi! Do you speak English?» happened somehow.

For now, we are in Paris. In the very center of Paris. Louvre is 10 minutes walking distance away. Not that we can visit any museums during the current lockdown.

I just have to say that we don’t really want to stay in Paris. There are many reasons: too many people around, lots of unpleasant smells, etc. We will definitely come over to Paris for cultural events and on other occasions. But we don’t want to live here. It may be strange that we, Muscovites, have this attitude. Moscow is a huge smelly city as well. Much larger than Paris, less smelly, but still, it’s a megapolis we were used to living in for decades.

But after Leiden, we are looking for something smaller and cozier. Yesterday, most of the apartments we checked were in Versailles, and we loved the surroundings much better. We’ll see if we get the apartment we want. Fingers crossed

As it appears, appetites grow, and we are quite particular in our housing expectations. My wife needs an office room. Besides a workshop I plan to rent in the future, we decided that I need at least one workroom in our apartment to perform the tasks that are not dirty and not loud at home (meaning not woodworking and not metalworking). But it would be better to have two workrooms: one ‘clean’ room for sorting orders, recording podcasts, making photos, scanning books, and placing my book collection; another ‘semi-dirty’ room for 3d-printers and some other stuff.

That’s already three rooms, not counting our bedroom and probably a living room, and a guest bedroom. Not that we are ready to rent a 6-room apartment yet.

At least, everything feels on track for the time being.

After we sign the rent contract, we’ll have to fix the internet connection, get the process going for our residence cards, and do some other things as well. I’ll have to move forward with registering a French company for iBookBinding and maybe start looking for a workshop (not sure how it will go during the lockdown).

I started writing this text with a feeling that I needed to share my anxiety about leaving the Netherlands and coming to live in a new country. As you can see, I absolutely forgot about that. Anyway, it was really strange, as we were so busy that my anxiety overwhelmed me only when we boarded the taxi that took us to Schiphol. Interestingly, the driver was a 70-year-old Tajik emigree who spoke Russian.

Yesterday, while we were driving from apartment to apartment, this feeling of unreality didn’t stop. So this fact that we are now living in France hasn’t settled in my mind yet. We’ll see how it goes

In the photos:

• pixel-art graffiti with space invaders and kissing girls;
• the phallic railing of the house on the other side of our street;
• me, entering our apartment through an outside-of-the-building staircase.