Wow. What a city. What an experience. Amsterdam? Or Dayumsterdam?? (sorry:) This city imprinted on me in a profound way. I don’t know if it’s the historical context in tandem with what the world is going through at this moment in…

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We’d been waiting patiently for months for this, and in the interim feeling very nervous - should an emergency require us to return home to the US, we’d be in a real pickle because technically we were not supposed to leave France’s warm embrace until this was official. So this news is wonderful on many levels!

First of all, (because I know I will get questions) we were able to get multiple years because of the type of visa I acquired (a talent rennomée) thanks to our incredible lawyer, Elizabeth Sotinel at TostadoAvocats.com. We are SO lucky to have this as it means we can officially live and work here. And yes, we can travel. And we have options for the next four years and won’t have to jump through administrative hoops for a while. RELIEF!

But along with that relief came the whispers of panic, its smokey tendrils creeping in under a shut door. Huh. This was the news that we were fully expecting to receive, that we’d put in significant time and energy into getting and is, by all accounts a huge privilege to obtain. So why, then, was this the feeling when I should’ve been popping bottles?!

Contemplating this, as I wedged my fork into my son’s fluffy meringue-topped tartelette au citron (my favorite way to contemplate), it occurred to me: This was the same feeling I had when our passports arrived, visas stamped inside, five months ago.

That was the final BIG hurdle for us in moving to France, a plan that had already been in motion for about six months. It had been a step-by-step process that almost felt like it happened TO us instead of the other way around. With each step, we anxiously awaited some huge roadblock. Something that meant, hey, you probably shouldn’t (or can’t) do this after all. That roadblock never came, not through getting original full length birth and marriage certificates from three different states, getting a financial dossier approved for an apartment search, getting all of our documents apostilled, then having them officially sworn translated, then getting our 90 page visa applications together (thank you to our lawyer!), finding our French rental apartment, booking our flights, waiting for news, going to our immigration appointment, waiting some more, finding a renter for our own house, turning in our car lease and selling everything we own, etc. The roadblock just wouldn’t show up. And so, with the final frontier being whether or not our hard-to-get visas would come through, I was naturally very worried.

But, when we got our envelopes, with nothing in them but our measly passports, we opened the pages, bracing ourselves that they might be empty. (That’s how you find out – there’s no letter. There’s either a visa stamp or not inside!) In our case, the visas were there! HOORAY! (scroll down beyond the paywall for a video of that moment)

And yet… That was when all the fantasizing and daydreaming that had been whirling around my head for over a year came to a screeching halt. This was real. We were going. The reality and enormity of that. I actually wrote a little something, just for myself, on that day:

Uh oh, the thing I wanted so bad has happened.

We got our Visas today. They came in four pre-paid overnight UPS packages to the UPS store for pickup, a choice Andy and I debated at length because we love to overthink things, especially when they are precious things: “Should we have them sent to our house? But what if we’re not home and they need to be signed for? But what if we put the UPS address and it doesn’t match up with the Visa application address? What if there’s a hostage situation at the UPS store that wouldn’t be happening at our home? But wait, could that happen at our home? Are we safe anywhere??? Do we need more distilled water? Wait, what were we talking about? Oh right, our passports and visa stamps. Well, what if we just flew ourselves to Washington and asked for it in person? What if What if What if?

There have been so many what ifs lately, the territory of what if being the LEAST comfortable place for me to reside in. And now, with this arrival, a million new question marks. The future is so uncomfortably open. Just the way I have desperately wanted it, haha. I know I’d be devastated if we’d gotten denied, but I really wish I could be more excited. Like, yesterday I was SO excited, dreaming about all the long strolls I’d take through Bordeaux, picnics with the kids, the oil painting class I’ll take, the leisurely Aperol spritz lunches. Fantasies I can barely access right now. Holding this passport with its hard-won stamp weirdly feels less like victory and more like a blindfold.

Also, we have potential tenants coming over today to see the house, why am I writing this instead of de-greasing our range hood’s lungs? There’s dust places!! So many godamned crevices. God, I’m so fun. France will be thrilled to have me in it.

Okay, so, reading this now, as I sit here with not only a Visa but a multi year residency approval, I just want to hug former me. Her stress and worry were very real. The unknown of everything was overwhelming and uncomfortable. I feel like I’ve grown so much - Yes, that was just a few months ago, but I feel so big sister to her right now and I just want to say: Chill, girl. It’s all going to be okay. Nay, wonderful! Not without its challenges, obviously, but you decided to go on this adventure for some challenge, didn’t you? Life had become so same old and frictionless. You needed a thrill. And… boy howdy, you got it! (oprah voice!) You get friction! You get friction! YOU GET FRICTION!!

So, a great reminder that I really need not panic about this good news. I didn’t need to then and I sure don’t now. Let the good news feel good! Life is so good if you let it be. Sure, it is very easy to get caught up in a worry spiral - either the bigger picture (did we make a mistake coming here? Is my career ruined? Are the kids going to resent us forever for taking them away from friends and stability?) OR the tiny details (why won’t the dryer actually dry a load of laundry, what’s for dinner every fucking day, when will I have time to write?!). But I must resist leaning into the spiral. I am so easily seduced by worry, the sultry slut. But to hop into bed with her is to squander the whole entire point of this adventure which is to take risks and enjoy every little and big thing we can.

I hereby challenge myself to lean away from whatever worry cycle du jour is beckoning me. I’m writing this from a gorgeous rental house in the center of Bordeaux. My husband is upstairs editing a podcast that’s just us literally hanging out together and that is our actual job. My kids are at school learning French and hopefully some other stuff too. Last night, Andy and I went out with some cool new friends and found ourselves in a long line for gyros at 9:45PM on a cobblestoned street that wound up from a stunning square along the river. The line was for good reason– mine was falafel and veggies with sauce, rolled into a warm pillow of dough so soft I could cry. We ate with our butts getting wet on the edge of a fountain probably created by a master sculpter/artisan in 1800 or something. It rained on us, but I barely noticed, nor did any of the other dozens of people else sitting around this square eating, talking and drinking. No one was bothered - the warm buzz of pleasure out in a beautiful world was keeping us all distracted. Or maybe, for me, it was the cocktail and glass of wine I’d had that provided the buzz? Hard to say.

That’s the good stuff. I have to now thank YOU, person reading this, because without you there, I wouldn’t have written this and writing this out has made me feel a lot more excited and celebratory about this whole “you’re a legal resident in FRANCE” business (!!) Because what has become crystal clear to me, time and again, is that the antidote to my own self-created stress is always, ALWAYS gratitude. And today, I’m swimming in it. Or sitting in it. Or Sitting on the edge of it, my butt getting wet and there you are, sitting right beside me.

*Putting this video of us opening our visa envelopes behind the paywall because it feels too personal to have out there in the whole wide world and also my accent is so terrible, it’s very brave of me to share at all haha.

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Well, I’m happy to report, I do believe I’ve found my reason for learning French. And it’s not what you might expect…

Because, I have a confession to make: I’ve been very half-assed in my dedication to learning French since our plane’s landing gear touched French tarmac. Wild, since I was so hard core about it right up until we boarded our flight. At first my excuse was just that we were getting settled and it couldn’t be a priority. Understandable. But over time, it’s become clear that I’m actively avoiding it. And I’m now very alone in my delinquency: Our kids have been forced into full throttle French immersion by virtue of a public middle school and Andy recently began a super intensive French course, perhaps without us thinking through the scope of the time commitment (lol?). And here I am, home alone, barely managing to watch a depressing true crime documentary with French subtitles on. When I try to put my finger on why I have thrown in the towel on learning French now that we are IN France, I come up empty.

It’s so weird! I love French and becoming fluent is a huge part of this adventure for me. And it’s not like I’m starting from scratch, I took French in high school and then when this dream started to crystalize a bit more a few years ago I started religiously doing an app called Pimsleur on my morning walks. This app, by the way, I found to be waaaaaaay more effective than the other one whose owl might come murder me if I spoke publicly about my true feelings. But thanks to the cumulation of all this cobbled together french, I’ve been able to get by pretty well. My mercis and bonne journées were a little sweaty at first but now I’m able to throw them around without a thought. The few times that I’ve found myself in more in-depth conversations, I find myself mirroring the speaker’s facial expressions and nodding along, hoping that at some point a word I understand will pop out to give me context (and hoping I’m not witlessly nodding along to something insane like yes sir I DO think those Cornell r*pists deserve to continue living normal lives.) Point being, I’ve found tricks to make my way through the world and my level of French is manageable. Makes sense - I recently took a formal placement test and found out I’m a B1 level which means you can do day to day stuff but you’re still thinking through most everything you’re saying.

Being at B1, it turns out, might be part of the problem. Andy came home from his (A2) class last week having learned that making the jump from B1 – B2 is wildly challenging. You’re basically chugging along at a slight incline on the effort chart from A1-A2-B1 and then the effort and dedication takes a sharp uphill turn. After B2, it’s another steady mild upward incline. This, he informed me, is called the intermediate slump.

This was such a relief to hear! I’m not alone - It’s a thing! A SLUMP!! Resting on my laurels makes sense because I can get by for the most part with day-to-day transactions and to level up will take so much more effort.

And I really do need to invest in the effort. I can feel myself slipping out of a slump and into a decline (has anyone ever moved to a country and gotten worse at the language?) A few days ago, I blundered and instead of saying “Au revoir!” (goodbye!) to the server at a café, I said “Aujourd’hui!” (today!) – Ugh! Don’t worry I paid a penance in the form of a 2:30-4:30am rumination on how embarrassing of an idiot I am that night.

Maybe that’s a good thing, a sleepless night and wanting to die from embarrassment? Maybe I’d be motivated by that? Unfortunately, as someone who embarrasses themselves on a podcast weekly, for a living, it’s not the golden ticket you’d hope. Which is okay, I have identified a much stronger motivation, which I’ll share in a sec.

But first, I have to brag that we had a big, exciting moment happen in our family. It was on the bus, coming home from picking the kids up at school. We were in four seats facing each other, when an adorable older woman sat down and asked if they were coming home from school. They both smiled politely and said yes. She asked about Otis’s cast, to which he replied that he’d broken his arm from running up a few steps. She asked what grades they were in – they answered and then clarified that they are in some classes together for foreign students but in different grades otherwise. She then commented to me about how adorable they are. This was all in French. And this is the point in the conversation I stopped understanding, because she started very quickly sharing more about her life and I lost the ability to track it. But the kids were fully locked in. They answered more questions, laughed together at the same times and informed me that she had 6 kids and one of her sons now works at the very hospital where Otis got his cast.

This was incredible! They were now the ones translating for me! And it was all so organic that we almost missed it. We got off the bus and I hugged them and told them I was so proud of them. I knew this moment would come – when they surpassed my own French level - but this was after only 3 weeks of school – that’s it! Incroyable indeed.

They are in a program at the public school that is about 50-60% learning French with a wonderful French teacher who is there specifically for foreign kids. The other time they go off to classes like science, music and art where they are with their actual French speaking classes. They don’t understand very much in those, but the point is really for them to integrate with the other kids. None of the other kids speak English aside from “See You again later!” but they are super sweet and welcoming. One new friend texted Teddy “you is funny” which of course warmed my heart to no end.

I am SO blown away by the progress they’re making and I’d be remiss not mentioning what a relief it is after putting them in a situation that’s so socially and academically challenging during such a formative time. They’re crushing it.

Which brings me to my own French and my raison for learning:

We live next door the chic-est as fuck people who are ostensibly very similar to us, on paper: They have two kids near our kids’ ages and they live in Bordeaux. On our street in fact! They are a husband and a wife. They have one pet and a pool from what we can see from our backyard – oh and I’ve looked! They aren’t like hoity toity chic either; they are unfussy yet extremely stylish, no makeup type, grab and go people who have a presence about them as though they aren’t rushing through life. It’s an ease! They are also, of course, incredibly kind and have offered to help us “with anything we need.” And yet they feel a million miles away in terms of je ne sais quoi. They are, in fact, the bizarro version of us where they are richer and better dressed and French and have a dog I would lay my life down for, so perfect of a spaniel is he. I don’t know what they do for work and I’m not sure I want to know because I will for sure be impressed by it and their friendship will feel even further out of reach.

Is it friendship I want? Or approval? Or just, like, their secret? Like, How do you always look so… fucking cool? And they’re always going places and doing things (!!). They have a beach house. They have tasteful parties that go late into the night but aren’t disruptive. They’re the type of people, I’m certain, who have a snacks/drinks spread laid out for guests that is so perfectly curated it’s spoken of in their social circles the next day. Which also happens to be when they get to cleaning up because they are enjoying themselves the night of the party and will get to the aftermath AFTERWARDS like the civilized fun people they are. Just this weekend, they were unloading a Porsche – not a showy one but an understated vintage-y one – because they’d gone to a wedding. Like, WHAT? A wedding you say? It’s like I’ve never been to a wedding in my life. I couldn’t conceive of having been to a wedding! That’s how they make me feel about their existence in the world. It’s a vibration I couldn’t possibly achieve.

But I’m determined to try and the first step will be to be able to speak to them beyond the “ca va?” “ca va!” bullshit we’re currently dealing with. My French goal is for our family collectively (yes, I’m dragging them into this) to be as close to fluent as possibly by the end of the year so that we can invite them over for an Apero and actually have a meaningful, laughter filled (oh we will laugh!) delightful, two way conversation where they leave thinking, damn, those people from Los Angeles sure are a good hang and also, have very interesting conversations and wow have they become more stylish this year?! We should have THEM over.

So I owe it to myself – and my future life-long relationship with these people, whose names escape me right now – to learn real French. Good French. The type of French that makes you go whoa, that there is some legit ass French. It’s my only chance to impress them – nay, impress upon them - and my entire life depends on it.

I’m signing up for proper, in person French classes today. They won’t be as intensive as what Andy’s doing but they’ll be consistent. And I’m putting myself out there more. Like this morning at the grocery store, the man was handing me items to pack into my little cart on wheels and I bravely said, “C’est comme tetris. Vous connaisez le jeu video tetris?” (it’s like Tetris. Do you know the video game Tetris?) To which he shook his head, confused. I normally would’ve jumped ship here but instead I doubled down and tried to describe Tetris. “Les bloques ont tombes et vous arrangez dans une… maison des bloques??” (translation I just looked up, ugh: The blocks have fallen, and you are arranging them into a… block house.”)

He shrugged, but at least I tried! As he gave me the last item – the eggs, I motioned towards my egg placement, nestled in with the paper towels. “J’ai fait un lit douce pour les oeuffs.” As in: “I have created a soft bed for the eggs” to this, my man laughed. His eyes crinkled and he laughed!!

As far as the Apero with our new besties, it’ll be on a warm spring day with a light breeze, the scent of jasmine in the air. There will be olives on the table and some cheese and baguette. In order to be adorable and to show I’m not pretentious I’ll also have some of my new favorite cheap grocery store chocolates, les petites coeurs in a little bowl. After complimenting my choice of wine – a crisp white - the wife will comment on how natural and advanced our French sounds. The husband will nod in animated agreement, marveling at how far we’ve come. He remembers we could only say a few words at first! I’ll then recount the story about how I once said “today!” instead of “goodbye!” We’ll all throw our heads back in laughter, our hair falling just so in the late afternoon light. The laughter won’t stop there, it’ll go long into the night and I won’t even feel tired. I’ll leave the lipstick-kissed glasses and crumbed plates on the table to clean up the next morning because that’s who I am now. I will be the French me. The French moi. I is chic. I is stylish. I is funny.

Today!

- Elizabeth

Which is definitely the chipper version of the truth right now. I really have to be chipper - bordering on shrill – or I fear I’ll crumple into panic desperation which is never a good look especially when it’s for something as pitiful as “Our dream of moving to France has been harder than I thought! Wah, poor me!” So, chipper, it is.

I was clinging to my chipper persona two weeks ago, waiting in the same plastic chair I’d sat in many hours for multiple days prior, at a non-descript office of French administration. This office handles… I don’t know what? But something to do with school enrollment. I swear the chair was starting to retain the shape of my buttocks, which I appreciated because at least the chair seemed to be acknowledging my existence. This time – our fourth or fifth visit - I vowed to make my presence stronger, more assertive towards the employee so it would for sure be the last time we were doing this. This time I made a bold choice and brought reinforcement - my son – whom I’d dragged along while encouraging him to “lean into the sadness bubbling up so they can see” (not hard as he was on the brink of tears). I also told him to: “prop your cast up visibly on the table” so the man who held his future in his hands might take sympathy on him.

Because, yes, my son did slip hard on the tile in our entryway and break his arm exactly one week before school was set to start. And in hindsight, that was the most straightforward part of our week(s).

The chaos cranked to a 10 the afternoon before school commenced – September 1^st – when we were confronted with the fact that we had not yet received confirmation from the neighborhood public school that the kids were starting there. This school has a program for foreign kids learning French, and is about a 5-minute walk away, a walk we’d done many times over the summer to help the kids feel like it was a little bit familiar. We’d taken all the required tests and filled out the paperwork and had been told that was where they’d be going, so it seemed like a no-brainer. Having heard nothing, and really as a precaution, Andy went down to this office to request this confirmation that we’d been told by another office that we’d be getting. Both offices, naturally, had been closed for the two months leading up to school opening because that is when everything closes and an office handling school stuff is no different even if that would be, presumably, its “busy season” what with school about to start.

We’d started this process in MAY, mind you, so it was a bit frustrating to not have heard. But with Andy being there in person, he was finally handed a letter to confirm – our daughter is going to a school, yes, but it’s not the one five minutes away. It’s a school about 40 minutes away that will require a 10-minute walk, a 15-minute bus ride and another 15-minute walk to and from it every morning and afternoon.

JFC.

This was not good news, (I secretly cried about it for a few hours) but at least she was enrolled somewhere and could begin school on the first day of school. This seemed important given that usually first days are kind of intros/orientations/get to know you days and our kids were being dropped onto another planet to navigate life without a language or culture or any sort of know-how. We didn’t even know if we were, like, allowed into the schools or do we just sort of shove them through the doors and pray they’d blindly feel their way through it? A crazy thing to think about. So, yes, having a first day at school with everyone was great – a privilege I couldn’t have even fathomed we would come to appreciate until the next series of events.

Because our broken-armed son – who also loves academics and was desperate to start - had been through the same process for enrollment but inexplicably there was no letter for him. We took him to the school with our daughter on that first day and said, hey, so he goes here now? But they weren’t having it. This began a week-long, everyday back-and-forth between the office with my butt chair and the school. And every day my son, in his cast, being dragged back and forth between them, getting increasingly upset that he couldn’t begin.

A week later, back in the chair, we were once again told to just go back again to the school – and they would enroll him there. This time was different because this man “helping us” had “made a call”. When I tried to explain in my terrible French that we’d done that multiple times already and they said they couldn’t possibly enroll him without the special letter from this man’s office, I was met with a blank stare and a puff of air from his lips: “C’est pas possible.”

This is a national slogan. You hear it often, out in the world, usually during some sort of transaction. I intend to do a whole post in the future about C’est pas possible, because it’s almost ALWAYS said about something that seems so wildly and utterly possible! Like this for example, he was saying it’s not possible to get the letter for your son to enroll in school, here at the office that makes the letter to enroll your son in school? The very office that provided the very same letter for your daughter a mere week and a half ago? A letter that probably took all of ten seconds to create and sign. And you’re saying it’s not possible???

Now, how you respond to this phrase will make or break you. There is a chess game and the first move has been made. It’s almost like our “A Christmas Story’s”: “I dare you, I double dog dare you”, and its specific cadence and sequence of exchange matters more than anything has ever mattered in your life. But I didn’t have any tutorials on how to counter. All I knew in that moment is that I couldn’t react the way I wanted to which would’ve been erupting at him:

You know what’s not possible, motherfucker? Me taking my ten-year-old son back to that school to have his hopes and dreams of joining his classmates who are already nearly two weeks into the term, crushed. Do you not see this innocent beautiful boy with his broken arm and puppy dog eyes? He didn’t choose this, his asshole parents did, so why are you punishing him, you piece of shit??!

I simply swallowed my rage, assumed the most neutral look I possibly could and said in my best French: “Oh I see. I thought that, because our daughter is having the letter, our son is having this letter too, the same.” The man’s gaze lingered on me before moving down for a split second to Otis’s cast and then up to his sad puppy eyes. I don’t know if I passed the test or if Otis won an academy award for his performance, but I could sense something shift in this gentleman’s demeanor.

Now, did we leave with a letter? Nope. Did I go back down to the fucking school and present Otis, emotionally drained of life force, once again? Yes. And did they ask for a letter this time?

Well… actually, no (!!!) Did I ask them why they weren’t asking for the letter?

What are you fucking crazy?

I smiled chipperly and filled out paperwork and acted like the concept of letter – the magical piece of paper I’d been chasing in my dreams for two weeks – never even existed. To this day, I have never laid eyes on the letter for Otis.

But he’s in school. Hooray. Both kids in school.

I’ve been looking forward to this moment with mixed emotions – eager to start “really” living in France with the rest of everyone doing the day-to-day things and very excited to have some real-life hours to work and what not, but also terrified for our kids who are going to a French public school not knowing any other kids or the language or the culture. I anticipated that the first week or so I’d be unable to focus and would feel that ill-at-ease listlessness all moms are familiar with where your heart is out there walking around separate from your body. In this case, my heart navigating a world where they can’t communicate. Really intense stuff.

It makes me tear up just thinking about how incredible they are. We now wake to darkness and step quietly out onto our cobblestoned sidewalks and towards a sky yawning pink and blue sunrise, framing two gorgeous spires of a 13^th century cathedral.

We bus it across town, walk past boulangeries being opened with the smell of fresh bread wafting towards us and make our way to their school where we say goodbye and smile and say, “you’ve got this.”

All the while thinking inside, damn, there’s no way I could be that brave.

Our kids have astounded us at how game they’ve been for this entire adventure. Not easy as a tween whose friends are their whole world, nor as a kid for whom routine and structure is king. But starting school crystalizes just how big of an ask this is for them. This is much, much more challenging for them than it is for us, and we’re the ones making them do it. It feels unfair and now that we are in the hard part – the murky not knowing of whether they will ever look forward to going to school or be able to communicate or get to be their wonderful selves with their new French friends – we are feeling so incredibly guilty.

But also knowing, we need to stay the course. Trust the process.

We are sending our little hearts out the door every day to march themselves to the heavy toiling of a situation that we ourselves haven’t and won’t experience ever. It’s weird. It reminds me of the pandemic, when after a year and a half into total isolation, our kids learned that we ourselves didn’t go through this in our lifetime. Not as kids. Not as adults. “Not once?” “Not once.”

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This hadn’t come up before then and I think they just assumed a pandemmy was like a rite of passage since we’d been shepherding through it so calmly and like this was kind of just normal!

“Well honey the truth is that we thought this was going to be a two-week situation and even that was unfathomable to us.” I remember when this sunk in for them – we’d never done it. There was something akin to betrayal in their eyes.

We’d been faking it all along.

Andy and I got a taste of what their days are like in French school a few nights ago at a parents orientation. We arrived and - of course - walked in to find only the very front two center seats still available. We awkwardly sat down and then smiled and nodded through an hour and a half of teachers taking turns speaking at us. We understood maybe 5%?

I think I could’ve done better, but lately with the French, I find myself doing something that’s not really in my repertoire: Giving up. I say this as someone who is four hundred pages into a book I knew I hated on page fifteen. I normally see things through. In fact, the harder the thing to get through, the more determined I am! Can I say this has been a worthwhile quality in my life? It’s a great question.

But right now, giving up sure feels like relief.

I feel myself slipping into the caricature of a doe eyed dummy who can’t possibly reach the dregs of her high school French files the way I can never collect the last few pringles in the bottom of the can because going elbow-deep is just too much embarrassing effort. So, no, good sir, I do not know what cahier means right now. I couldn’t possibly. “C’est pas possible”.

On our (long) walks home, I’ve assuaged my guilt by quoting Robert Frost to my kids – the old “the only way past something is through it” or whatever. I always forget the actual words because what I want to say is “the only way through something is to cry a lot.” Or “the only way through something is to make many stops at the boulangerie.” The Frost version wasn’t very comforting to them. It’s very true though, the only way to get to the part we’ve heard about, the magical time where French clicks in for them and they can fully be their wonderful selves with their new friends is to keep going to school and enduring the long days of learning and hearing and speaking French. Something I couldn’t even do for an hour and a half because language fatigue is no joke. It’s weird, expecting them and encouraging them to endure a level of hard they don’t realize I myself definitely wouldn’t be able to muster! Am I a monster? Possibly! A monster without muster.

All I can do is act like I know what they’re going through and express that I believe in them and they’ve got this. And wildly, it seems to be working. There are bad days, and tears, but there are also days that are “fine” which feels like a win right now. And all the while, they don’t even have wine in the evenings as an escape hatch.

Their bravery astounds me.

Have you been so inspired by your kids you could burst? I am just so damn impressed, which I can’t even express to them fully because it might give away that this is actually impossible! But it’s actually not because it’s them doing it and not me! And I have to remember to keep my guilt in check – maybe I’ve underestimated them (it appears I have) and we aren’t monsters to do this. Maybe our dreams of this being enriching and beneficial and a beautiful experience are valid? Time will tell. In the meantime, I’m taking Frost’s words to heart for the parenting side of things. The best way out is through (nailed it!) And I’m trying to focus on those beautiful spires in the mornings, solo coffees at cafés nestled under fifteenth century bell towers, my beautiful husband and I sharing a look, marveling at how lucky we are to live out this dream and to watch our children blow our minds with their bravery.

C’est, in fact, possible. C’est très très possible.

*If you want to hear more about our feelings assimilating after this bumpy period, you can check out our podcast’s Patreon episode this month where Andy and I get verrrry real with each other on where we’re at.

Look, I get it, Paris is PARIS, but it’s a bit too much for us. We four are all sensitive to noise and bustle and… erm, how do you say… too much sidewalk péepée? Il y a beaucoup de piss.

But that’s not to say we don’t ADORE Paris. It’s the place that made me fall in love with France to begin with. My first trip was part of an incredibly generous high school graduation gift from my Mom, and we had an absolute ball together. I vividly remember one of the best meals of my life there with her. It was a five course private room situation that she had arranged. For me, a difficult vegetarian, the standout was a fresh pea soup where each bright pea pearl was the size of a grape, nestled with mint sprigs and herbs in a bowl which then had a hot puree of pure cream and mashed peas poured over it. It imprinted on me. And you know what’s really wild? I don’t even like pea soup!! This was that special.

My second time there was during a backpacking stint I did as a twenty-two-year old after having lost my parents and then broken up with my compulsively lying boyfriend after stumbling upon his wedding album I hadn’t known existed. That time I stayed at a sketchy hostel whose façade doubled as a public restroom. (Sidewalk piss central). This time I mostly just wandered around dreaming of returning as a fully formed adult with a partner I loved because the romance surrounding me felt so out of reach.

That fantasy was actualized years later in 2011 when Andy and I visited and had a magical trip sipping wine at café tables and laughing/crying taking photos of door knockers that looked like penises, like the mature “fully formed adults” we were. Dreams do come true!

There’s simply nowhere like it, not even Bordeaux which is commonly called “Le Petit Paris”. It has this nickname because Haussmann, the man whose name is associated with the blonde limestone facades and elegantly designed boulevards, worked his magic in Bordeaux before he set his sights on Paris. Bordeaux also has an international airport, amazing public transit, great schools, and a more laid-back vibe thanks to the weather and/or the wine. So far, it really feels like it’s the perfect fit for our family. Even if there still is more la peepee on les rues than we’re used to, it’s manageable.

In planning our move, a part of us living here included the expectation of quick trips to Paris to visit friends, or for work (I have a meeting at Netflix Paris next week, so if I must spend the day in the city before hand I guess it’s my burden to bear) and I’ve always looked forward to mother daughter shopping trips like the ones I took with my mom. So it was VERY exciting that my daughter Teddy and I got to go there for a day trip – 2 1/2 hours on a train there, a day with friends, and 2 1/2 hours back.

The night before, I was mentally preparing and excitedly said to Andy “Can you believe we’re going to Paris??” And then he did one of those emoji faces that shows all the teeth like --- yeesh, “good luck with that.” While it wasn’t the response I was going for, I understood why he said it.

We have all been having some serious feelings lately, and throwing a big long travel day in the pot seemed like a real bad bet. I’d say big feelings but I’ve recently learned my kids don’t like that because it’s infantilizing. Then I was using the term crashing out which I really like to use, but it turns out I was minimizing everyone’s feelings (my own included) because I wasn’t using it properly. For anyone else who is not a teenager, my current understanding is that saying I crashed out means you overreacted to something relatively small. What we are going through with an international move is not small and all of our feelings are valid!!! something I remind myself through gritted teeth forty times a day. The other ten times I’m usually the one crying so it’s harder to say out loud. All these conversations about what words I’m allowed to use or not use have happened in the last two weeks, to give you an idea of how often we are having don’t-say-big-feelings and stop-using-the-term-crashout-meltdowns.

But the feelings go the other way too. Like, the other day I went to get stuff for dinner and found myself in such a charming square with an old-as-hell church and incredible boulangerie à côté. I walked into a fresh pasta shop, whose mere existence makes my heart pound, and in that exact moment a woman carried a huge tray of just-made Taglietelli forth. “Bonjour!” She said. “Bonjour!” I exclaimed, my enthusiasm giving me away as a foreigner even before my terrible accent. Just then, I swear to god, the church bells started RINGING. It was all just so over the top charming I couldn’t contain myself.

Two hours later, however, I was in a bathtub sobbing and unable to regulate myself out of the overwhelming stress spinning in my head. WTF. The whiplash from joy to despair is alarming. Now, might this have something to do with switching my estrogen patches to new French ones? Possibly. Does French estrogen hit a little different? Like kind of aloof but also pragmatic, truly a team player but you have to earn her respect? Who’s to say.

More likely it’s just that everything is so wildly destabilizing when you move whole ass countries, especially when you’re in charge of your two favorite small people for whom you’re constantly worried you’ve made a huge mistake by uprooting them. Plus all the tiny stressors you can’t anticipate that drain your life force. Such as: Why do you put salt in a dishwasher? How do you put salt in a dishwasher? Why are there no trashcans anywhere? What size and type of sheets do we need and where, for the love of god, are the sheets sold and what should you do with the three extra duvet covers you’ve inevitably bought on accident during three separate trips for flat sheets? Also, how is this one ply bitty cocktail napkin meant to last you four courses? And lastly - but always - where is ice? (The frozen kind, not the rhymes with schmazi kind – that, I’m overjoyed to live without.)

Well, despair not because: Enter, Paris! My twelve-year-old daughter and I took the train up mid-morning. She is just the most fun travel buddy because she shares my propensity for oohing and ahhing over everything novel and beautiful. The buildings in Paris are about twice as tall as Bordeaux (le petit, indeed) and while our new home city feels much more livable, strolling around those massive Parisian corridors of majesty, it hits different. It’s almost like they’re keeping you tucked into the wonderment because the buzzy energy has nowhere to float off into. My sweet girl and I strolled along the Seine, happened upon a miniature circus of stilt walkers (naturally), and then had an incredible lunch with dear friends from LA in a beautiful little pigeon filled square. We hit up a total of 5 different boulangeries in as many hours (one boasted the best croissant in Paris but I think it was more like that scene in ELF where the crappy diner’s sign says World’s Best Coffee. We got happily suckered.)

We went to the world’s oldest magic shop, had the best ice cream we’ve ever had in our live long days, and stopped for an early dinner with another friend who lives locally. We basically opened our veins and mainlined that heart swelling feeling of awe for six hours and when we got back on the train we both collapsed into our seats, content, ready to be back in our home away from home.

It was a salve. That concentration of awe. Because that’s what we’re really here in France for – to live more openly to the wonder of our experiences and our surroundings. I want to tap into that as much as possible in this lifetime because it makes me feel like I’m aligned with god or the universe or whatever is bigger than us.

Paris makes it so easy, like plucking a sun-ripe lemon off its bended bough. Sometimes, when I pass a scowling French person daitribing a complaint to their friend (a national pastime, complaining. Nay, an art.) I think that maybe they don’t necessarily know what they’ve got. And, I guess, why should they? We all eventually take a lot in our lives for granted. Which is why I feel so lucky to have had the chance to leave places. Whether St. Louis or New York or Santa Barbara or Los Angeles, leaving cements them as life chapters I have so much adoration for - the beauty (and people!) I love so deeply and I now get to miss. This latest leave of our scrappy neighborhood in East LA had me getting emotional over every little thing - the Chinese Elm tree in our backyard. The friends we’d greet walking our kids to and from their sweet little school. Even the endless power lines draped over the city like a threadbare afghan. It’s all a tapestry of joy.

So, thank you France. We are here in our new chapter, sullying your peepee streets with our big feelings and our deep desire for more ice in our drinks, but in return we are gasping at your glory and soaking it in. I vow to never take you for granted, but if I feel like I’m starting to, I’ll just bop up to Paris for a reset.

The person I loved most in the world growing up -- My mom – also had a major sweet tooth. I have the sense that I came from a long line of women who deeply appreciated chocolate. I also, like most 40 somethings, came from a long line of women who were at war with their bodies. In our house, we ping-ponged alongside my mom’s mood depending on whether she was on a diet or not. If she was “being good”, there was slim fast in the fridge and literally nothing else whatsoever to eat in our house. If she was “being bad” we had cinnamon rolls and candy and pringles and bagels. In either version, I don’t remember there being vegetables outside of an occasional canned green bean - The 80’s and 90’s were not culinarily sophisticated despite how stylish we were.

Perpetually hungry, and destined (doomed?) to exist in a body that required more food than a few Triscuits with a squirt of Cheese Whiz for lunch, pleasure became inextricably linked to food, early on. This was very much at odds with the body I was assigned at birth, which was very much at odds with the body I knew I should have, according to society and everyone and everything. Not surprising that I very quickly got all disordered about it. It didn’t help that my mom enlisted me to go on a diet with her when I was twelve, us giggling over a cottage cheese scoop on a singular lettuce leaf at Neimans like two school girls who were in a secret adorable club. I loved her so much, it really breaks my heart that not only did she think that was a good idea for us to bond over, but that I relished every starving second of it.

When my mom died seven years later, I turned to ice cream. So did my dad – and when I was home from college (frequently because I was worried about his grief and his drinking), he and I would have “midnight snacks” of ice cream. We hovered over our bowls, perched across from each other at the kitchen island, illuminated by a single light while the rest of the too-big house remained dark, having just recently lost its heart. Later I would learn that alcoholics frequently have an ice cream habit because there is so much sugar in alcohol that ice cream can mimic filling that void.

When my dad died soon thereafter, I upped the ante and turned to getting high and baking. I made pound cakes and brownies and mini Nilla Wafer cheesecakes to distract myself from the pain of being suddenly orphaned at 19. It was sometimes unbearable sadness and sometimes just the detached feeling of being untethered to the world, but it sucked and I much preferred to be within arm’s reach of both a bong and a mouthful.

This pattern escalated until a few years later when I grew out of needing the bong but the need for baked goods had taken over my life. I’d, by then, moved to New York with a group of amazing friends and when I wasn’t working or performing at the UCB Theater, my entire existence was organized around what treats I would eat and how I was going to get them. I’d go from one place to the next for my fix - There was Veselka for the brownies, City Bakery for chocolate chip cookies, Magnolia for cupcakes. I’d zig zag all over the city, then bring it home and eat zoned out watching Golden Girls. I never even tasted that stuff, by the way. That’s the bitch of an eating disorder - you don’t even get to enjoy the thing you’re obsessed with.

But then something huge happened. My childhood mega crush, Andrew Rosen, recognized me on the street one night and lo and behold, bada boom bada bing, we were falling in love. This felt heaven sent from my parents – particularly my mom, whom I’d talked to endlessly about my heartthrob 7^th grade crush who had a yellow guitar and a smile that melted me and a prince poster in his locker. He marched to the beat of his own drum then and he did now as well. I was smitten. Having not felt this sort of alive since losing my parents, I wanted to be mentally healthy enough to have this relationship last. And while I’d always told myself that, since I never purged after binging, this couldn’t have been a true eating disorder (it was just a willpower issue,) deep down I knew I needed help.

This is when I found my incredible therapist, Lisa. Obviously, my main goal in therapy was to make her laugh, so I joked a lot at first about how not purging was the problem because it showed that I didn’t have follow through, and that was why I was in therapy - jokes I’m sure she inwardly found hilarious even if she wasn’t laughing. But after I dropped the stand up workshop, she, over time, helped me realize that I was actually suffering from something well beyond my control.

One tearful session when I felt particularly hopeless, she asked, have you ever considered thanking your eating disorder?

Um. Come again?

She repeated: have you ever considered giving gratitude to the thing you needed to get through an impossibly hard other thing? This really blew me away. Reframing my binging and addiction like this stripped a lifetime of shame off food and my body and all the things. The shame that was there when my mom asked me to go on that diet when I was twelve. It was there when I was sent to my best friend’s pool birthday party in a muu muu at eleven while everyone else – including my thin older sister – was in bathing suits. It was there during my mom’s “being good” stints during which I’d binge at friend’s houses where there were always Twizzlers and Entenmans. It had been there always and forever, a dark lump of shame on my sternum – like a congealed ball of the brown waxy chocolate crust on those very Entenmans donuts. And now I could let go and start healing.

Since then I have worked hard to come to a place of peace-ish with my body, which has not been linear AT ALL and a huge part of the process has been being married to a man who constantly tells me how beautiful he thinks I am (even if I don’t believe it.) And I’m finally at a place with food where I’m able to actually appreciate and find pleasure in. I cannot even express what a gift it is, at long last - eating good things is such a huge source of joy that no longer feels like a coping mechanism but a magical portal to living a richer life. And it’s a portal I had to fight hard to get back. I am very proud of how much I love food. And while sweet treats have my heart, my soul is equally comforted by other meals - my dad’s famous spaghetti sauce that we had every xmas even growing up (and my sister and I still make each year) and my veggie loaded nachos, my cuban black beans and rice. But now I’m actually able to find real comfort and pleasure in such mouthfuls instead of numbing out in a shame spiral. Which is helpful, because life continues to life, you know? It’s not always going to be sunshine and roses (and thank god for that!) and it’s nice to turn to something delicious for a brief moment of escape when that something isn’t cloaked in dysfunction.

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For example, a few years ago, I (along with many of my friends in the biz) had a full blownsies identity crisis. The industry I’d fought so hard to become a part of was shrinking, if not collapsing. I had been working steadily in entertainment to the point where I was the number two in a network show’s writer’s room for a few years straight. I had been able to work with amazing people, I got paid very well and I never ever took for granted how lucky I was to be there. But still, chasing the dream of having a career in TV for so long caused me to put the role on a pedestal and I’ll be honest, I was a little bit high on my own supply. My friend once said to me that, in Hollywood my “stock price was high” and that’s how I felt – I’d easily get the next job, if I even wanted it because really I should just sell my own show and make it, right?

But then we had a writer’s strike and networks stopped buying shows and there were about half as many jobs out there. I took out three different shows to try to sell within a year and a half – something I’d done twice before, and without much fanfare, years earlier – but this time I came out of those thirty plus pitches empty handed. These were ideas I was heavily creatively and emotionally invested in, so letting go of the dream of making them was very painful. And aside from that, during those first two years, I barely had any staffing interviews, let alone job offers.

I was humbled to a pulp.

Financially things were strained without one of our salaries, so dinners out and activities became fewer and further between. We downsized to one car since I was never going anywhere and Andy worked from our converted garage/studio. We cooked at home and spent a lot of family time together – a huge perk of a tough time - but I always reserved some funds to go towards weekend treats. Since this was the one time I allowed myself to splurge, I’d scope out the best Los Angeles had to offer – Loop Espresso Club’s banana bread, or croissants from Artisinal Goods By CAR come to mind. And this time I’d bring them home to actually enjoy them morsel by morsel… to the degree that our children should be food critics because we would discuss in such detail what was working for us and what wasn’t texturally, flavor wise, and overall experience.

I feel like I have to caveat here so it doesn’t sound like I’m having too big of a pity party that others had it so much harder than I did – I knew we would be OKAY, but in the meantime I was experiencing a full ego scrubdown. I really had to disentangle my identity from my career which was surprisingly painful, even with my daily mainstay true pharmaceutical love, Wellbutrin. I was depressed. Or ‘depwessed’ if I was trying to be a pouty sexy girl to my husband, which he prefers when I’m crying. My ego had to let go of so much scaffolding but now I’m really so grateful for it all. This experience forced me to ask what I really wanted out of life!

Which brings us, finally, to France! Part of the ego wash was finding new dreams for myself. I started fantasizing about an entirely new life, away from Hollywood and all of its trappings.

At first my fantasies were out of a bad novel where Andy and I had bought a run-down chateau (with what money? I can’t fathom!) and were slowly chipping away at the renovations ourselves (with what skills? I can’t fathom!) but had done enough of the work to at least have a shabby chic kitchen that functioned so that I could make warm pain au chocolat every morning (with what energy? I can’t fathom!) Our kids would run out into a grassy field with the chocolate still smeared on their cheeks as they spoke to geese and ducks in the perfect French they’d magically picked up - there was also a pond on the property, obviously.

I started watching Youtube vids of expats in France with Andy and sucked him into the alluring calm of French life. The chateau idea quickly got scrapped (he wisely pointed out some details I’d missed such as how we had no money for a chateau and would likely get electrocuted if we tried to DIY anything,) in favor of a simpler version wherein we would just live in a city and go to the boulangeries and eat the delicious work of others at very reasonable prices. It was never meant to be a reality, just a silly fantasy stop gap until my life and career got back on track.

But, weirdly, that didn’t happen. The career eased back in over time when I got hired to co-write a feature film thanks to one of my closest friends (and the aforementioned showrunner to my number two). I also got to release a podcast I made with my husband and our dear friend Monica Padman that did so well we actually unseated Joe Rogan on the charts (!) So, the career was humming along and money wasn’t as tight.

But we still couldn’t shake the pull of France.

We decided to visit Bordeaux last summer, assuming a full month would scratch that itch… annnnd unfortunately it only deepened our obsession. It wasn’t just with the pastry – which was, of course, ridiculously good. Nothing and I mean no thing beats a warm out of the oven pain au raisin with its millions of buttery layers and delicate custard lace with pops of bright juicy raisin. But there was also everything else: It was the incredible beauty all around us, the car-less existence we’d missed since New York, the stylish women in dresses pedaling adorable bicycles. It was the charming farmers markets in squares that you just happen upon. It was being filled with awe at every turn that this cobble stoned street leading up to a thirteenth century church just simply quietly exists here?! The slowed down lunches where everyone spills out onto a terrace, casually enjoying a plate of pasta and an Aperol spritz with friends in the middle of the workday because pleasure is the point! It’s the whole world, and it didn’t help that our kids loved it too. By the time we left, we felt like our story here had just begun.

So, here we are back in Bordeaux, having fully moved for a year trial. The future is a giant question mark and while that kind of sends me into a panic, the unknown is all part of the adventure. Of course, we are all homesick in our own ways (more to come on that!) and yet it feels like we’re right where we are meant to be right now. So, if pastry’s the thing that got us here? Great! I do not have a single regret… Because life is short. Find your joy where you can and then savor every buttery crumb you can.

Until next time, mes amis, bonne journée!

- Elizabeth

Because, as I would start to discover after four completely closed boulangeries later, every French person leaves for vacation during August, and boy howdy do they just straight up LEAVE. If you’re lucky there’s an askew Handwritten note taped to the door saying something along the lines of: “Later suckers!” On Yelp or Google, there is no mention of the closure, so it’s something you must discover in person. If it’s a different type of business than food – real estate or banking or tutoring admin, say, trust that no other colleague has been briefed - no emails with: “if you need immediate assistance, please reach out to Camille.” They’re all just… gone baby gone.

I don’t know how this works in an economy where presumably some places would have to be open for the French people who are visiting from other places in France and who would want to eat at restaurants and send their kids to camp or buy clothes and whatnot. Not sure how that goes, but that sort of detail is not a concern! This is a world where, wildly, sales and shareholders don’t matter as much as people. Or their summer tans.

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Being new here and having just gotten my pastry addiction into full throttle, it was obviously disappointing to have to ride home that morning empty handed. But beyond my initial discomfort, I am so fucking inspired by this whole French attitude. Mostly because I can’t fathom leaving a public bathroom stall without making sure the person coming in after me is up to speed that the latch is faulty and that there’s limited toilet paper, let alone just up and walking away from a whole ass job so abruptly that my cubicle seat’s still spinning?! Bananas. But these French folks have a cultural entitlement to rest and pleasure that they have fought hard to get (strikes work!), and they do not mess around.

In hindsight I caught my first whiff of this vibe very early on into our move – two days to be exact, but it didn’t fully sink in at the time because it just seemed so… frankly, outrageous?!

This was right when we arrived in the first few days of July and were informed that our children had to take placement tests to be enrolled in public school. Luckily, smartly (thank you, me! Some things are well worth paying for in an international move) we’d hired an incredible woman named Caroline to help us with our house rental and school stuff. After an hour of testing, the kind employees looked over the kids’ work, smiled and said (in French): “We have recommended them for schools, but it is now out of our hands. You will either receive an email confirming their placements directly from the schools tomorrow, or you will receive them the day before school starts.” I assumed this was something getting lost in translation – tomorrow, or… not for two months? Caroline gently broke it to me in a tone that is saved for telling toddlers they can’t safely pick up used chewing gum off the sidewalk and make it their own.: “I’m afraid that’s just how it is here.”

I was shook. I knew summers slowed down but I assumed there were guardrails in place for kids – particularly innocent foreign kids whose idiot parents recklessly upended their whole lives and are now getting enrolled in school where they won’t know the language or people or operations or anything!?!?! All my plans of being a responsible parent – doing practice walks to the schools so they have a familiar sense of the routine, joining the associations of the parents and possibly even planning meet ups ahead of time so our kids had at least a familiar face on day one, out the window. As was looking online for any link to the school with photos and then scouring the student’s faces in those photos for signs of joy and/or depression. Not happening! I started to contemplate how to advocate for my kids in French, how was I going to push back and fight without, you know, the language?

But there in Caroline’s voice was the wisdom of someone who had walked this path mannny times: You MUST unclench. To clench is to suffer. The path of enlightenment is unclench=eth=ed.

Point being: This is almost something that happens to you because if you fight it you are going to be miserable. So, here we are, mid-Août, with no idea if/where they are going to school come September 1st. Who cares! Whatever! Pass me another Aperol Spritz!

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As of this here morning we’ve officially lived in France for one month and one day. What a wild thing. We live here?! We live here. We have an address and a bank account and a pharmacist and I know which of the five boulangeries within walking distance of my home is my favorite (en fait, they all are my fave depending on the pastry I want). It still blows my mind that we live here, which is funny because A LOT of people live here?? It’s not like it’s mars - though some days I do very much feel like an alien who has been plopped down in this weird, enchanting world and they’re going to figure out I’m in the wrong place any minute and send my green ass back onto the UFO. Other days I feel like I’m getting the hang of things and could maybe even blend in and maybe even feel like I belong.

Every day I have pastry - obviously. Every day I put a little more effort into how I’m dressed. Every day I look at my husband or kids and nod towards some wildly gorgeous church or building or decorative door knocker shaped like a fish or a child’s hand and say, “Can you believe??” And then yesterday my 12 year-old daughter looked at me while we ate ice cream side by side at the front table of a charming café, both facing out so we could people watch properly, and said “Wait. So, we’re not technically tourists, are we?”

Huh. Nope my love, we are not tourists. We are bonafide, sort-of-not-yet-official residents who have moved here and live here. It’s bonkers.

It was a very timely observation of my astute daughter, because last summer, for the exact same period of time – July 1^st to August 1^st, we were tourists right here in Bordeaux. It was the month we fell in love with the city and thought maybe we could be insane enough to move here one day. I can’t help but reflect on how different things feel this time, a sentiment shared by my daughter who pointed out that last summer the month felt a lot longer by now.

I nodded, understanding completely – last summer’s vacation was jam packed with activity and culture and soaking it up. This month has felt like we’ve actively avoided any soaking up, something I feel sort of guilty about, but the truth is that the process of moving is very different from going on vacation. (And, to be fair, we spent one week of this month in an adrenaline spiral because there were the biggest wildfires in French history blazing 7 miles away that threatened the entire city being evacuated). But natural disaster aside, it would appear we’ve maintained a real low energy output so far.

Last summer the kids had skateboarding camp and we went to museums and exhibits and took boats and bought tickets and took pictures and sat on top of buses with other tourists so we could ooh and ahh and laugh when the pimply tour guide made us feel like the guillotine joke he says fifty times a day was just for us, fresh as a daisy.

This time we’ve mostly just existed in a half-awake state, oscillating between the tearful overwhelm of disorientation and the tearful wonder at the sheer beauty around us. The truth is we’ve done a LOT but it’s mostly real-life stuff like obtaining bikes or finding a pediatrician, or admin stuff like opening a bank account (a very complicated process) and attempting to get the kids enrolled in school (a very VERY complicated process that is still in flux,) and figuring out which toilet paper isn’t just some cruel joke that will result in fecal papier maché. We were lucky enough to rent a home that was fully stocked upon our arrival but of course we still needed to buy things like a printer and a step ladder and a bass for our daughter and the right origami paper for our son. All things we know how to do in the US, but require a lot of extra energy to figure out here. And then after whatever thing is acquired, we go home (home!) and throw on Elle or Brooklyn 99 and zone the fuck out to comfort our brains.

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This is where the guilt comes into play – I mean, what are we even doing here? Why have we not been to a single museum, but we’ve been to every mall on the outskirts of Bordeaux in search of black beans? I have to remind myself of a few things: Emotionally, as a tourist, the forever-ness of your new physical location isn’t weighing on you. And that’s on both ends – last summer we weren’t arriving having freshly uprooted our entire lives, having done the exhausting work of selling or storing all of our earthly belongings, moving out of a whole house, applying for visas, having tearful goodbyes and getting a cat and ten suitcases and four humans through an 18 hour travel day. (Yes, the cat peed in the carrier two times). Secondly, we also weren’t bracing ourselves for the emotional weight-to-come of missing our friends, our lives, the tiny little comforts of home that we took for granted. Last summer we knew we’d get right back to black beans after our flight home. This time we had to bike an hour away to obtain them from a seedy strip mall grocery store like we were scoring meth.

So, I have to be gentle with myself. Our experience here is just beginning and in many ways it hasn’t yet truly begun. But today - this here day - I’m off to purchase museum tickets for this afternoon. These tickets, by the way, will be practically free thanks to a program for the kids of Bordeaux residents called Carte Jeune that I indeed took the time to sign them up for on day two of our arrival. So, the admin is already paying off! And weirdly, having a year’s supply of black beans in our pantry is what makes me feel like we CAN do this. Those little haricots noirs have laid the emotional foundation for us to go out in this wild, cobblestoned world and culture our asses off.

Until next time, mes amis, bonne journée!

*PS. Anything in bold is something I plan to write a post about in the near future, so please subscribe to stay tuned:

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