How To Escape Paris
We took a day trip to the nearby countryside. But one American couple had to flee back to the US after their dreams of France crumbled.
Drought fears are mounting. Macron’s government is still under siege. But let’s take a brief detour this week from the apocalypse to remember how amazing life in France can be.
We have entered the April school vacances period, the latest two-week school vacation period. And so on Saturday, we drove 45 minutes to the village of Magny-en-Vexin, located in the neighboring Val-d'Oise département.
This rustic corner is in the larger Île-de-France region that encompasses Paris but feels like another world. We live in the Parisian ‘burbs, which has its pros and cons. One of the pros is the ease with which we can escape Paris’ massive center of gravity.
The day was grey and rainy, and the agenda was simple. A walk out of the village, and then return for lunch. The walk was 90 minutes. The lunch was 2.5 hours. Because one must have priorities.
Our friend had booked a table at a little bistro called Le P’tit Bouchon. That requires a surprising amount of practice to say correctly because, as our daughter instructed me, you place your lips in position as if you are going to make the “p” sound but then you don’t quite do it and skip directly to the “tit” (tee). Bouchon is the word for “cork” in French (and also, helpfully, the word for traffic jam). In this case, it’s also a gastronomic reference to Lyon’s renowned bouchons, which are small, cozy bistros where people are seated almost elbow-to-elbow and are extremely social.
We arrived at 12:30 p.m. sharp for our reservations and were the first customers. But 30 minutes later, every table was full and the restaurant was buzzing.
Having chosen this village because it was the mid-point between our homes, we respectively knew nothing about it. The choices for restaurants were slim, and Le P’tit Bouchon seemed to have slightly better reviews than the other options.
Here’s the aforementioned great thing about living in France. For just about any profession, white or blue-collar, people receive very serious training and education. So the person waiting on your table or working in the kitchen is likely a pro with deep knowledge of food and cooking skills. That means that even when you come to some random, out-of-the-way restaurant chosen by chance, you can still get an astounding meal.
We got an astounding meal.
There is nothing like a decadent meal in the middle of the day to reaffirm that despite occassional frustrations and hassles, we made some good life choices by moving to France.
Alas, KJ Foster, 58, and her husband, Tony, 66, did not make such good choices.
Emily In Hell
The international community in France has been buzzing the past couple of weeks over the cautionary tale of this couple, as reported by the New York Post, who unintentionally gave a masterclass in how not to move abroad.
Let me preface this by saying that our own move to France in 2014 was the result of some fairly unexpected and random life choices. My wife spoke a little French, and the rest of us spoke none. We had already committed to moving to Toulouse before we had even visited. While we certainly made our share of cultural pratfalls, in retrospect, things went fairly well those first few months because, you know, we did some research. There is this thing called the internet that contains a treasure trove of information about just about everything.
The Fosters apparently did not do their research.
Instead, they had visited Paris and were swept up in the romance of the city and just decided to chuck it all and move here. Over a long weekend last May, they made the final decision and by November they had moved to Paris.
It is hard to feel a terrible amount of sympathy for a couple whose major preparations for moving to Paris included the following list: “We sold our four cars, gave away our furniture, our five big screen televisions, most of our belongings.” I mean, these were people with means.
But they had gone all in.
Naturally, they decided to document all of this on social media and it very quickly went viral. Their YouTube channel has 9,100 subscribers. And their first video has 263,539 views. Pas mal.
But in that first video, the cracks were already showing. Within the first minute, after an introduction, they promise a tour of the 40-square-meter Airbnb apartment they had rented. It is a walk-up, and that apparently hadn’t fully sunk in when they booked it.
“We're standing right now on our street which is Rue de Lahar and then we're going to go and show you the four flights of stairs that we climb —59 steps! — multiple times a day, up and down,” KJ says. You can get used to a lot of things when moving to a new country, but those steps are still going to be there.
Indeed, as the Post says: “Behind the camera, the Parisian idyll had become a nightmare — thanks to French haughtiness, language difficulties, homesickness, the challenges of living in walk-up apartments, and some bad French onion soup.”
Some of the critiques the couple makes of the French are not totally wrong, but they are the kind of things (language, cultural norms, social manners) that you can learn about in advance, along with strategies for adapting (and understanding and appreciating) these differences.
Unfortunately for KJ and Tony, too much went wrong, too fast. The stair aggravated her old knee injury. They became homesick. Making their popular videos became a stressful chore. Finally, KJ got food poisoning that may or may not have come from eating French onion soup. (She doesn’t really know, but not knowing for sure has never stopped a good tabloid reporter!)
A few weeks ago, they moved back to the US and are regrouping.
(Side note: The Post story refers to Emily in Paris as “the popular Netflix rom-com about an American girl who goes to work for a French social media company.” Certainly, a quick search of the aforementioned internet would have unearthed a more accurate summary of her job in the show.)
Again, it’s tempting to mock or be dismissive. But it’s also worth applauding the boldness of taking such a big risk in life to pursue a dream. I hope they make it back, and that any lingering aftertaste from this misadventure will have washed away.
It is Spring in Paris. The city is coming alive. And to their credit, KJ and Tony did get this much right: France is an amazing place to live. I hope they come back and rekindle their Francophile romance.
Chris O’Brien
Le Pecq
Their experience is sad. My family moved to Grenoble in 2002 and stayed a year. It was a fantastic time, but not without its ups and downs. In retrospect, I look at any cross-cultural move like that as proceeding in phases... there is the ~3 month honeymoon phase...”This is so cool! So much better than Xxxxx”. Followed by a bit of a souring where you realize things just “don’t work” the way you expect them to. You just “get” your native country and you just don’t get this new culture. It’s as simple as stores don’t match your American expectations -- no you can’t get toilet paper at a pharmacy but you can at a drug store in the US.
Eventually, if it works, there is acceptance -- there are things that are different here and I don’t totally get why, some are good, some are in my view better in my native country -- but I live here now and have to adapt. It really gives you a deeper appreciation for the many, many immigrants who doubtless experience this in America.