One of the best things about moving to a different country, different city, or even a neighborhood is a chance to explore new locales and collect new impressions and views.

Of course, this is possible to do during travel as well. But travel isn’t immigration, and many fine details remain unnoticed. You are overwhelmed with impressions and just don’t get a chance to process everything properly.

Quai Anatole France

I changed my place of living several times throughout my life. I almost don’t remember my first move, as I was a small child when I lived in Romania. But Romanian was my first language, and I feel the influence of the Romanian culture even now.

In Russia, I mostly lived in Moscow, but I also spent some time living in Saint Petersburg. And then, Moscow is such a vast city that moving from one district to another puts you into absolutely different conditions. That experience I had as well, as I lived in 8 different apartments in 5 different Moscow districts. And some of them were quite opposites of each other.

Then Amsterdam and Leiden happened to us. These also were very different experiences, and we are grateful for having a chance to live in both of these cities.

Jardin des Tuileries

Currently, we are still living as tourists in Paris. It is really hard to start noticing fine details after being in the city for only a couple of days. Of course, our attitude is different compared to when we traveled through France in the previous years. We are looking for and noticing different things. We are searching for different experiences and services.

Still, we need more time to settle before we start exploring our new home as immigrants, not as tourists.

During these first days, we walked quite a bit. 10 kilometers per day, on average. It’s probably twice more compared to our standard routines back in Leiden. And one of the goals was to start rebuilding at least some of these routines.

When my lovely wife was still working at the office, I almost always walked her to the Leiden Centraal station and met her when she returned from work. Among other things, like discussing news and ideas that matter to both of us, it allowed me to have my daily walks even while I was primarily working at home.

Jardin du Palais-Royal

As you can imagine, this routine was broken after lockdowns began and many offices were closed. My wife had only a couple of office days in the past 12 months. Our solution was to have evening walks every day. One of our favorite routes went through the Plantsoen park that is stretched along the canal that once was the town’s moat.

Yesterday we went hunting for a new route that can substitute our Leiden’s standard walk. Obviously, in a large city, it is hard to find something similar to what you get in a small town. While I lived in Moscow, one of the most unpleasant things to me was these parts of the walks or bike rides that happened before you get to a park or your favorite picturesque route.

Jardins des Champs-Élysées

I was lucky that at least several of the places I lived in were near large park zones in the suburbs of Moscow. However, the places I lived in the past 10 years or so, were located in the city center. And while it was great in many ways, getting to green places from there was a challenge.

In Paris, our first impulse was to check the nearby parks: Jardin du Palais-Royal, Jardin des Tuileries, Jardins des Champs-Élysées. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to do that on Easter Sunday, but soon I realized that I forgot that many of these parks have these wide sandy alleys where dust is set in the air by footsteps.

I have asthma and allergies, so that’s a major concern to us.

Jardin des Tuileries

By the way, is it that in the Jardin des Tuileries the grass is out of bounds throughout the year, or that’s only a spring thing while it restores before the new season? Because later we saw that in the Jardins des Champs-Élysées you are allowed to walk on the grass.

Anyway, for now, we settled on walking along some of the esplanades. At least until we move to our permanent apartment that will probably not be in Paris. It’s a ten-minute walk from our temporary home to Voie Georges Pompidou, so it’s even not much longer than the time we spent walking to the Plantsoen from our house in Leiden

Some of the esplanades have trees, some of them are fully paved. Both works for us, but the green ones are obviously better. We’ll see how our new routine goes in the upcoming days

As usual, we’d be grateful for any recommendations!