My First Time Living in Paris

The joys and the frustrations…

I stepped out on a cold, damp January morning to walk to the nearby supermarket for groceries. When I reached, I realized I had forgotten my phone.

My language handicap gnawing at me as I needed the French-English translation app I was using.

I didn’t speak a word of French, which wasn’t ‘Bonjour’, ‘Merci’ or ‘Au revoir’ back then. I was looking for salt at the supermarket.

It was the start of 2016. I had just moved to Paris. For a couple of months, my husband’s MBA hostel became our abode. He was pursuing his MBA at HEC Paris back then.

And I was tagging along while continuing to do my old job from Paris.

“There is but one Paris and however hard living may be here…the French air clears up the brain and does one good.”- Vincent van Gogh

The HEC campus was brilliant. I got a first-hand insight into the top MBA college experience.

There were parties, partner engagement group activities, gym, and lectures. With time, we found an elite group of friends to hang out with. This brought in the feeling of ‘a home away from home’.

I became known as the ‘beer pong’ champion at parties. It was a game in which we tried to throw small plastic balls into beer-filled cups.

We went over for dinners every other night. Once I cooked traditional North Indian food for a group of friends we invited.

In my contemplative moods, what I most looked forward to was walking through the campus to come to a hidden lake. This provided time for deeper conversations.

Since it was my first time living outside India, the feeling of newness was hard to miss. It was fascinating to reach the city of Paris in under an hour from the campus.

Life in Jouy-en-Josas was interesting. I walked through a forest to commute to work via the RER regional trains. I learned to pronounce the names of the stations by trial and error.

After initial mistakes, I employed a strategy to silence out half the sounds in a word, and it seemed to work.

For example, in ‘Nation’ you spell the ‘na’, then I figured ‘t’ was usually silent so you scrape through it as ‘si’. Then you spell the vowel ‘o’ and leave the ’n’ at the end.

If you speak French, you’ll be aghast at this. Yet, it helped me to converse with people and make myself understood.

“Boy, those French. They have a different word for everything” — Steve Martin

Coming back to Jouy-en-Josas at night if I was travelling from another city was a challenge.

I am not the brave soul who can walk through a dark and desolate forest alone. I either called my husband to join me, even when I knew it would interrupt his study time. Or I prayed I would find an Uber.

Often, I worked from the room at the campus. The neighbor next door was a heavy snorer whom I could hear sometimes, even at 12 in the noon.

Gosh, how I wondered why this guy didn’t go to any classes and kept snoring.

Sometimes, I banged on the wall to shake him up, when I had a hard time hearing anything on the call because of the loud snoring. Soon, I made the investment in top-notch noise-cancelling headsets.

Stepping around the campus, I enjoyed going to the local bakeries for fresh bread.

The supermarket closest to the campus was a huge one. This is where I had a hard time remembering what salt was called in ‘French’ without my phone.

To my dismay, I asked about 20–25 people and no one seemed to know what it was. I thought they were pretending to not know. However, I was outside Paris, and they looked genuine.

Finally, I found a Chinese student who could help me and I made it back after spending 30 minutes trying to find salt. Phew, bless his soul.

Since then, I’ve had many experiences in foreign countries. This one, with all its little joys and frustrations, is most special. It’s fresh in my mind until today, like it was yesterday.

More joys for sure. Like exploring Paris as a local, seeing the life at a top college campus, and interacting with the French day in and day out.

I left a part of my heart there. Perhaps, because I agree with F. Scott Fitzgerald.

“France has the only two things towards which we drift as we grow older — intelligence and manners” — F. Scott Fitzgerald