Reflections on World Travel

Living in Paris Through My Daughter’s Eyes

To understand the world is to engage with its people — in real time!

I’d like to think we gave our daughter the gift of curiosity the first time we took her to Europe when she was nine years old. Little did I know that she would return that favor by making our world larger as she “introduces us” to people we’ll never meet and shares the stories we’ll never live.

We had a long Facetime call with my daughter Elizabeth this morning. She was having a lazy day “at home” where she’s living with a family in suburban Paris.

The main headlines for the week were a series of updates about the people she’d met since arriving about a month ago to begin graduate studies in an educational science program, hosted in France, taught in English, with a student clientele from all over the world.

So many interesting stories she had to tell, like…

· The girl from Lebanon who was apparently fascinated with Parisian traffic signals since there are none where she lives at home. They exist, but they don’t work, since the electricity is usually turned off.

· Or the guy from Russia who’s understandably cautious about coming out, despite being with the same partner for nearly three years.

· Or the two girls from Turkey, one of Armenian descent — a story that especially resonated with my daughter since she and a female friend drove across Turkey a few years ago,

· Then there’s my personal favorite — the guy from Ghana who was, shall we say, a bit reticent to join in all the weeping and wailing about the passing of the Queen. His was a story of Colonialism from the inside looking out. Not much pomp and circumstance there.

The last story especially resonated with me as I recently had a professional engagement that took me to Scotland where the intention was to participate in a musical performance for Queen Elizabeth. As it turned out to be just a few days before her passing, she was not in attendance. But soon-to-be King Charles was there. My wife could have grabbed his coattails as he walked down the aisle at the end of the concert. He was that close. Suffice to say that’s made for all sorts of good stories at social events in the recent weeks.

“You were where? Performing for whom?”

I doubt that our daughter Elizabeth bothered to share that story with her new friend from Ghana. If you’ve spent any time on MEDIUM at all in the last month, you are well aware that not everyone on the planet is outwardly enamored with the Royals. Most who are vocal enough to write on the topic hold the Monarchy personally responsible for the perpetuation of oppression while grasping the threads of world domination. Perception, positionality, and political persuasion totally changes up the storyline.

Having visited Israel several times, I’ve also read quite a lot about Lebanon as we were scarcely a stone’s throw from the Lebanese border traveling eastward beyond Haifa on repeated occasions. I remember listening to hear shelling in the distance, knowing there was fierce fighting going on at the time.

I later read a piece by an author in the New York Times who charged her MacBook for the hour a day that the electricity came on, hoping it would not only give her a few more hours of writing, but maybe the sporadic power surge might save some of the food from spoiling in the fridge. She told of how her neighborhood had once been vibrant with nightlife and frivolity, but none of that is possible when people have no money and everything falls into darkness at sunset. My daughter was not sitting across the table from that journalist, but her stories were eerily the same.

Elizabeth is no stranger to world travel. Our kids started going to Europe with us when they were preteens, largely due to our affinity for family naturism, in which case, all roads lead to France. She would return to Paris after college to work as an au pair for two years before moving to Brooklyn to teach elementary school. That led to grad school at Columbia where she fell into the abyss of post-pandemic dysphoria in the midst of a staggeringly bleak job market. Meanwhile, schools all over the country were embroiled in debates about whether the Civil War belongs in a history book and if so, which version. And that’s to say nothing of the attacks on civil and women’s rights — arguments that all seemed unfathomable five years ago.

In the end, she moved to the Hudson Valley, started a tutoring business (that she still runs from Paris) and decided to make a go of it on her own. As the Supreme Court started flexing its revisionary muscle, she struggled to find a healthcare plan that wouldn’t leave her in financial ruin. Then out of nowhere, an opportunity appeared where she might return to France, have access to comprehensive healthcare, reap the benefits of the declining Euro (Sorry about that European readers!) and in the best case, come home with a more worldly perspective than when she arrived.

If the first month is any indication, it seems that’s all going to pan out pretty well.

I’m not going to deny that I’m suffering from a serious case of FOMO, though at my age, the opportunities for experiences like this are vastly different than those for a 30-year-old. My wife and I took an apartment near Aix-en-Provence for a year about a decade ago. Most of those stories depict the inherent drama of our melting brains, struggling to forge new neuropaths in the midst of language immersion classes. Our days were largely consumed with living in fear of the postman or repair guy showing up at the door unannounced as we’d hide behind the kitchen counter — pretending nobody was home — knowing we didn’t have the language skills to handle the impending conversation on the other side of the door.

Elizabeth, on the other hand, came home from that au pair assignment fully conversant in French. Upon returning to Paris she was feeling a bit smug in the mastery of her new native tongue — though again, all the instruction in this particular program is presented in English.

But then it dawned on her.

“All my new friends are struggling through French classes and love it when I’m around to help them with the more complex interactions of daily life. But they’re learning (at least) a third language, and my ability to speak Turkish, or Russian, or Lebanese is absolutely zero.”

Once again, it’s all relative to one’s perspective.

As we ended the call, I found myself bursting with curiosity and questions about my daughter’s new colleagues. How does the Russian guy feel about the evolving drama in Ukraine right now? What will become of a place like Lebanon when the people have had enough of dark nights and spoiled food? And while so many Americans glibly lump the doings of the Royal Family in with the Great British Bakeoff, how many people in Ghana, Australia, India, and South Africa, [insert list of half the planet here] are sitting by waiting to see if the change in the monarchy regime will result in an outright denunciation of world domination by wealthy nations?

One thing’s for sure. My daughter was pretty well attuned to most of these things before she boarded her flight at Newark Liberty Airport a month ago. But now, I think she would be the first to throw out a statement like, “Geez, I really hadn’t thought about it like that until halfway through the second beer last night.”

Isn’t it bizarre that while we can’t escape the fact that the internet, air travel, and social media have resulted in the irreversible reality of a truly global economy, we know amazingly little about the world beyond our front doors? The US stock market can’t sink without taking Asia down with it. And while the faltering Euro might make it cheaper to book a nice hotel the next time I’m abroad, who knows what that will mean in the long game?

In the years just before COVID, I visited Sri Lanka, Russia, China, and Japan — all of which are impossible at this writing. (Rumor has it that Japan will open back up this month, but at the moment, it seems Russia may well be off the table for the duration of my lifetime.) We like to say that change is inevitable, but nobody has to ability to comprehend just what the butterfly effect of those changes might be.

I think that’s what frustrates me the most about the MAGA banter, the Qanon theories, and all the rest. For my daughter, Lebanon is a real place now, with real people trying to live their best lives. And I suspect she’s already done a quick Wikipedia search to see how many countries other than Ghana speak English, or French, or Dutch, or Portuguese. Once you’ve sat at that table, with those real humans, you simply can’t unknow that stuff.

Am I envious of Elizabeth? You bet I am. As I am of anyone who surpasses the designation of tourist, exceeds the limitations of traveler, and goes for the fully immersive experience of simply “being there.”

There’s no substitute for that.

Am I proud of my daughter? OMG — yes!

I’d like to think we gave her the gift of curiosity the first time we took her to Europe when she was nine years old. Little did I know that she would return that favor by making our world larger, one Facetime call at a time, as she “introduces us” to people we’ll never meet and shares the stories we’ll never live.

If I can’t be there myself, I’m pretty sure that’s about as good as it gets.

Maybe even better!

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