The MOST IMPORTANT Thing Nobody Tells You When You Move To Paris For A Year
A tale of two ungrateful ingrates on Thanksgiving.
My partner, Tor, and I conquered the shitty coffee experience here in Paris by having my son bring back six pounds of our favorite ground blend when he went back to the states to visit his dad. This would be enough to hold us over until Christmas as we have each of our states-side offspring and also, my mother-in-law, bringing us 30 more pounds. That should hold us through spring.
We conquered the French bureaucracy that should make perfect sense but doesn’t make any sense with their own expression, “C’est La France!”
We have learned to say “Va te fais enculer!” (“Go fuck yourself!”…pardon my French) when it comes to the rudeness that cannot be dismissed with a “pardon” or a “désolée”. (You can take the girl outta Brooklyn, but ya can’t take the Brooklyn outta the girl.)
We re-focused our minds towards net-working, preparing for our upcoming gig in Normandie, and forming our thoughts around our next adventure in duo-writing: a screenplay filled with hope, inspiration and of course, love.
What we simply could not shake, and had no way of preparing for, was the fact that the sun would not shine for over thirty days straight.
So we broke. We broke down I tell ya, (said in my best mid-Atlantic accent). With each passing, dreary day, Tor was becoming the worst version of himself: pissed-off at the world and letting everyone know about it, in French, in English, in Franglais, in hand gestures. Then there was me, acting holier-than-thou, meditating and box breathing and journaling and saying things to him like, “we just have to accept the things we cannot change…”, you know the rest. I don’t know what was worse, him acting out or me acting like I was healthfully moving through the fact that the damp, cold, no-sunshine-for-over-a-month straight wasn’t getting to me. It was. Deeply. Getting to me. Why didn’t we know about this before we moved???
BECAUSE NO ONE TELLS YOU THAT PARIS IS DEPRESSING IN THE WINTER. No one. Well, maybe ONE person warned us…my son. Last year he did a two-month winter stint there at an intensive French program during his gap year. He experienced so many beautiful things most American, 18-year-old young men can only dream about: clubbing until 3 a.m., picnicking with friends behind Notre Dame along the Seine, falling madly in-love with a beautiful, rising starlet who just walked the red carpet at Cannes next to Johnny Depp. With all these magical moments, apparently he did mention that it “rained a lot in Paris and was kinda’ depressing.” Okay, so someone warned us if not in a vague, teenager-y kind of way.
…every morning we woke up to the same gray on gray backdrop with the drizzle + downpour that may or may not deluge from the clouds that draped the city of “light.”
But did we listen to him? Hell no! All the wheels were in-motion to move here: my other son was set to go to a school, we’d already rented out our home in Brooklyn and booked a flat in the 19th arrondissement. I had studied for and passed the B2 DELF exam in order to be considered almost fluent in French. (I’ve accepted the fact that fluency just ain’t gonna happen in this lifetime.) Our visas were processing and my car’s lease was up. Suffice to say, there was no re-negging on this commitment. But let me tell you, it crossed both of our minds pretty much every morning we woke up to the same gray on gray backdrop with the drizzle + downpour that may or may not deluge from the clouds that draped the city of “light.”
Our dream had become a nightmare. Our plans for one day, permanently moving to Paris had been crushed. You can throw London in that pile of rain-sloshed dreams while you’re at it. Not that we ever wanted to move to London but, it has a well-known reputation for being dark and dreary MOST of the time. No hidden agendas with that place. They wear it loud and proud which is, in my opinion, the reason why they have a pub on every corner. What else can you do to forget that the sun was smiting you for eternity but to find your happiness at the bottom of a bottle of Balvenie?
To make things worse, it seemed like we were the only ones being affected by it. We went out with some of our new expat friends for coffee and they were beaming with glee, even going so far as to say, “Isn’t this weather just wonderful?” I said, “You’re joking right?”, to which the wife responded, “Well, no. We’re from Seattle where it rains all the time. We’re just happy it’s 55 degrees!” Ugh. I began to wonder if we weren’t just American assholes who couldn’t be grateful for an opportunity many people would kill for. And in light of Thanksgiving being just around the corner, I felt even shittier about our shitty attitudes. Be grateful Lisa!!
So we decided to “be the change we wanted to see” and found ourselves on a new mission aptly titled, “Get the fuck out of Paris ASAP!” We researched Amsterdam but the tickets were too expensive. We Googled Morocco; it was warmer, exotic and it definitely got the stamp of approval from my world-traveled son. We finally settled on Sicily. Flights were cheap, hotels were cheaper, and we love The Godfather.
The air rang with a language that made you feel like you were dropped in a Rossini opera and left there to die in your own leitmotif.
The moment we stepped off the plane, a giant weight felt like it had lifted from our shoulders. It was nighttime in Palermo, but it didn’t matter. A different brand of sunshine came through in the energy of this new and magical place. It was exciting. It was carefree. It was…warm. Not only was the temperature warm, so were the people. And happy. The people were happy. The air rang with a language that made you feel like you were dropped in a Rossini opera and left there to die in your own leitmotif. I started to feel something I hadn’t felt in a month…joy.
We picked up the rental car and found that Sicilians drive like every road is their own personal autobahn. It was NUTS. Speed limits were just suggestions, as were stop signs and fuhgettabout being a pedestrian. Whenever you walk across the street in the crosswalk, drivers speed up like they are actually trying to hit you! What a difference from Paris where the rules are the rules and by god, everybody’s following them. This was barely organized chaos and we LOVED it.
I’m not going to bore you with all the details of our five-day getaway to what has become one of our new favorite places on the planet. But I will say our “Mafia Tour” was a sporadic walk on the wild side with breaking and entering a public park in Corleone, accidentally ending up in the birth town (Lercara Friddi) of Lucky Luciano and Frank Sinatra’s father, eating the most delicious cannolis in Modica where we also crashed a funeral, made fun of the Michael Jackson “art” made out of chocolate, and tried to get fake married (that’s a story for another Substack). Waking up in Taormina to the SUNRISE on the Ionian Sea, and staring at the “toe” of the boot of Italy didn’t suck one bit. Nor did the best homemade, black tagliatelle pasta with shrimp and mussels pulled directly from the sea, or walking the craters and dried lava of Mt. Etna or lapping up lemon granitas. Let’s say it was a jam-packed, 5-days of making our own brand of delightful fun.
We found our wonder again. We found our zest. We found our magic. We found our smiles. We found our humor. All the things we originally found in Paris all those years ago that made us want to move here for a year, we found again…in Sicily.
(Above is an exclusive, sneak peak at our forthcoming Sicily video series for GenXpatsFrance on Instagram. You saw it here first my dear Substack Subscribers!)
We returned with a new enthusiasm for our purposes in life: I’m working on my memoir with new vigor, Tor’s working on his novel with lightning-quick downloads from the Universe, we bopped-through our repertoire for our concert on Friday with happy hearts instead of arguing over who was taking the harmony line in the second chorus of “Tennessee Whiskey”, and we figured out the secret to the next nine months in Paris…planning trips away from Paris!
Some people would consider our new plan a “bucket list.” I call it a “fuck it list”. Fuck it! Let’s go to Israel when there is a ceasefire! Spain! Amsterdam! Northern Lights in Norway! Motorcycle tour of Ireland! Visit friends in Berlin! Sardinia! Athens! Pyramids in Egypt! Camel rides in Morocco! Florence/Rome/Venice! Paris has become the portal to joy everywhere…else!
Truth be told, even if every Paris-centric influencer on TikTok and Instagram would have plastered this downright depressing reality all over their feeds, we wouldn’t have listened. Dreams are funny like that. It’s why crazy people like us chase them. Our hearts led us here, where we thought we’d find the answer to our call for a new awakening. Little did we know that we were meant to be called on a more expansive journey beyond our wildest dreams. And that’s how the story goes…if you let it.
Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate. There is always MUCH to be grateful for, even for a couple of ingrates living in Paris for a year.
In Laughter
LStL
P.S. Travel tip if you find yourself in Europe in the fall/winter, the off-season is the bomb! You save so much money by traveling to the usual hotspots when there are no tourists jacking up the prices.
I didn’t see Vienna on your list.. if you decide to come east, let me know, I’ll show you around (and you can throw in Salzburg, Prag, Budapest in that package as well).. I lived in Paris for 2 years “when I was much younger”.. but I DO remember those interminable dreary Winters! In those days I couldn’t afford to take a trainride down to Nice, now I highly recommend it to you..
hang in there, Spring WILL come 🍀😂🍀👋🏼 salut, anna
Ha! I’m from London and have lived in Paris twice in my adult life. This last time was after 10+ years in NYC and I tell you the long, grey slog of winter nearly did me in. NYC will rip your face off with the cold in winter but it’s often technicolour. Blindingly bright. Heavenly in the late afternoons when all the buildings glow and you get these incredible icy sunsets across the Hudson. Whereas the cold here is sharp and biting, Northern European winters have that dreary, damp kind of a cold which lives in your bones hours after you move inside. I love Paris (although not with the rose-tinting of many of my American neighbours, I am British after all) but I’m ashamed to admit how rough it was on my mood. I thought I was made of tougher stuff!