Before I left for France, many people had things to tell me about what it was going to be like. “Everybody is rude.” “It’s so romantic.” “The Seine smells bad.” “The food is amazing.” “Watch out for terrorists.” For the most part, I tried to ignore their advice. I wanted to go into this with a blank slate and just take it for what it was.
After completing all my paperwork and receiving my visa, I was ready to go. I found a relatively cheap flight and was able to pack my life into one suitcase. I’m usually a pretty light packer and usually try to remember that all I ultimately need is my passport. It was only when I got on the plane that all the bad things people had said started getting to me. What if I didn’t like it? What if there’s another terrorist attack? I was pretty intimidated as we arrived at the airport. We met up with a mutual friend who drove us to our apartment. It didn’t help that on the way home, the driver kept telling us to be careful, watch our wallets, showing us all the trash on the street and generally trying to scare us for some reason.
After settling in a little, however, I had mixed feelings of nervousness and excitement. I was nervous about not knowing how safe the area was where we were living and not knowing the language. I was excited about the prospect of exploring a new area. We started the process of mapping out our area by taking small walks around larger and larger circles around our apartment, scoping out convenience stores, grocery stores, pharmacies, etc. The neighborhood seemed pretty nice. As a friend later said, it was like the part of Paris that would be on a postcard. There were lots of little shops, nice greenery, and it was pretty clean.
Our apartment was on the first floor, which was nice to hear people outside at the cafes and to people watch, but a little scary in terms of security. We had very large windows and only one door from the kitchen to the street. When we arrived, it was especially hot, and I usually left the windows open for as long as possible in the morning and night to let the cool breeze through.
We tried a few local restaurants and started shopping at the grocery stores to try to figure out how everything worked. It was intimidating, but manageable. There were a few differences I noticed right away, such as the language, the sound of mopeds, the narrow streets, and smoking. Obviously the language was different, but it’s always a bit unnerving when you can’t understand anyone around you. I couldn’t tell if they were saying something nice, or mean or asking me a question. There was one instance where an old man asked me for the date and I think he had to repeat it about six times until I actually understood what he was asking. The moped engines have this sharp piercing sound that startled me a lot at first. I guess we don’t really have anything like that at home and it sounded to me like someone was running through the streets with a really loud weed wacker. The streets of an old city were also very different to me. In general, the cars are much smaller in Paris so they can fit through the streets and park in very tight spaces. I’d say most roads are one-way with minimal room on both sides. Lastly, smoking seems to be still pretty popular in Paris. I see many people smoking in their homes and outside of work. That trend really seems to have substantially subsided in the US, so it seemed to me like there were a lot of smokers here.
Eventually, we started to settle in and the worries started to fade away. Generally, people were very nice and we started to stitch our lives into the local culture.
Living in Paris 