Place Plumereau is located in the medieval section of Tours, and is therefore among the areas most frequented by tourists - but you wouldn't know it from the amount of locals who hang out at cafes like this one. This group of hipster-y French twenty-somethings were sitting at the bar and playing cards with each other and the bartender as I drew them. They seemed to be regulars, as did most of the people who came in and were warmly greeted by the bartender and other patrons. As I mentioned one day to my mom how charming I found this card game to be, how lovely it was that these friends could meet up at their local cafe and hang out there as if it were their home, her voice became wistful as she sighed in Spanish, "Ah, that's how life is in a small city", and she went on to say that's how Santo Domingo was when she was growing up in the 50s and 60s (the many stories she's told me over the years being testament to this).
I kind of wanted to talk to these people, and join in on the game, but I was in one of my more introverted/my-French-is-not-good-enough moods, and I just couldn't do it. Even when this one dude who was sitting next to me saw me drawing and tried to flirt with me in French (as he did with some young blond student who also seemed to be a regular), I just couldn't force myself to speak that much in that moment. My big regret from my France trip is that I didn't talk to as many people as I would have liked to... I mean, I did end up being much more extroverted than I was when I went to Barcelona as an 18 year-old, and Madrid at 20, 21 (and was practically fluent in Spanish versus my intermediate mastery of French), but I still could have spoken to more people.
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