"Bonjour, Monsieur. Are you sleeping off a hard night?"

No, I did not say that. But I did have an interesting encounter with a couple at the laundromat. Before I get to that, though, I should offer an explanation:

We have a washer at our apartment, but no dryer.  That's fairly common in France, because energy is very expensive. The French get about 40 percent of their energy from nuclear power, so they are very good at conservation.  (I've always thought that the entry lights that switch off automatically were a great idea.  They are.  But they're not so great when you're half-way down the stairs, and the light goes off!)

In any case, we dry our hand laundry on a rack and use the laundromat for larger, heavier items. We found it fairly easy to figure out the system, because there were instructions in English for the washers, and the dryers work similarly. The machines are numbered, and selections are made at a central point, where coins and currency can be inserted, and change is given, if necessary. It costs about $4.89 to dry a load at the rate of  €1.20 for 9 minutes for three cycles, at which point most items are dry.

One day, when I came to the laundromat, I encountered a young couple spread out on the floor, snoozing away. I don't know if they were homeless, or just sleeping off a night of too much revelry, but I said, "Bonjour," and we had a brief conversation, in French, about where I was from. Satisfied, I assume, that Kevin and I weren't going to tell them to leave or call the police, they settled back into slumber while I dried my clothes.

Now, lest you think we live in a sketchy place, I assure you that it is a friendly,  diverse, mostly middle-class neighborhood (though we do seem to have one, sad resident homeless person, whom I intend to write about later), but my encounter was definitely out of the norm.

Note the feet in the photo (on the left).