One month later

We left for Paris on September 29, arriving around 9 am on September 30. After a whirlwind week of packing, movers, cleaning, last-minute errands, dragging 6 suitcases around with us, and a trans-Atlantic flight, we were exhausted. We made it to the apartment we were renting for the first month, had a somewhat confusing introduction to the apartment from the owner, and then collapsed into bed for a quick nap. A month later, it feels both like that moment was yesterday and like we’ve been here forever.

It all still feels a little bit surreal. Sometimes I have to remind myself that we actually live here now and are not just on vacation; this is probably because I’m still getting used to not working all of the time. And at times it does feel like a glorious vacation. There are so many new places to discover and old favorites to revisit, and you can’t walk the streets of Paris without being constantly struck by just how beautiful this city is.

But don’t think for a minute that it is easy to move to a new country where you don’t speak the language or know anyone. The smallest things can be strangely difficult, like the first time I set out to clean our temporary apartment. I ended up sitting on the kitchen floor with my laptop, using Google Translate to identify the 30+ different bottles of cleaning products under the sink. I accidentally washed the same batch of clothes four times in a row before I finally cracked the code and figured out that the picture of a tiny sun meant ‘dry’. And I found out the hard way that not all dishwashers will stop running when you open the door to add that one last forgotten spoon.

We’re now in our permanent apartment, but we still aren’t settled in yet --- in fact, the list of things we still need to do sometimes seems endless. We are still dealing with immigration-related paperwork. The apartment is still missing all sorts of necessities, in part because we haven’t yet received the things we shipped from the U.S. to arrive. I’m still trying to master the nuances of the combined countertop oven/microwave. It all feels a little overwhelming sometimes.

But despite all of the work in the past month and the work ahead of us, we still love Paris and feel incredibly lucky to be here. I can’t wait to see what the next few years here will hold.

Here are some of the things and places that we’ve enjoyed during our first month:

Sacré Cœur

Walks around Montmartre while we were in the temporary apartment

Au Levain d’Antan, the bakery where I bought most of our baguettes while we were staying in the 18th

Shopping at the Bastille market on Sunday mornings to get produce

Crepes at the Breizh Café

Stopping for coffee or glasses of wine at Pause Cafe

French basque food at Café Tolo

Living Arrangements

We moved to Paris without finding an apartment ahead of time, instead renting a temporary apartment to stay in for the first month while we looked for more permanent housing. We've both been through the apartment searching process back in the U.S. a number of times, but quickly learned that the market in Paris is very different.

When we learned that we might be moving to Paris, we started looking at apartments online. It helped that prior to moving here we had visited Paris (separately and together) several times and had some ideas about which neighborhoods we might want to live in. But even within the general area we targeted, there were a lot of spots with which we were not familiar. I spent a lot of free time with www.seloger.com (a site we were told that "all the Parisians use") open in one window and Google maps open in the other, trying to figure out exactly where all of these apartments were located.

We were lucky enough to be able to visit Paris again this summer, and we used that time to look at our favorite neighborhoods from the perspective of a potential resident rather than a tourist. It was really helpful to walk through all of the streets that we had been looking at online and realize that some places were even nicer than we had suspected (the northern part of the Marais, for example), and that others were maybe not quite what we were looking for (there was a disturbing rat-related incident that ruled out one particular spot).

Narrowing down the neighborhoods was fairly easy, but we still had a lot to learn about apartments in Paris. One crucial piece of information is that a so-called "unfurnished apartment" isn't just an apartment does not have furniture. In Paris, an unfurnished apartment's kitchen usually does not come with appliances, a sink or cabinets. The apartment might not even have light fixtures! The tenant is expected to provide everything, and then to take it all with them when they leave.

We ultimately decided that living with someone else's furniture would be preferable to assembling and installing an entire kitchen within a month or so of arriving in a new country, but we still needed to educate ourselves to properly set our expectations. Our home in the U.S. is about 1200 square feet and has a very typical condo kitchen. Most of the apartments in Paris that we looked at in person or online were in the range of 400 - 700 square feet and had kitchens that were minimalistic by American standards. With my love of cooking I was a little nervous when I would see apartment listings where the kitchen consisted of a small sink, a refrigerator smaller than the one I had in my freshman dorm room, and two electric burners. That's it. No cabinets, no counter, no oven, no freezer except the tiny compartment inside the refrigerator. Not all kitchens were this primitive, but by requiring a kitchen that could actually be used for cooking we were ruling out a number of apartments.

We also saw a lot of apartments that seemed fantastic on paper, but which were on the 7th or 8th floor of buildings without elevators. When our own building's elevator broke the day we left our condo to move to Paris and we had to drag all six of our (very heavy) suitcases down five stories, we were reminded that while we don't generally mind taking the stairs, there are advantages to being on a lower floor.

One thing we didn't realize until we arrived in Paris and started actively hunting for an apartment was just how quickly the market moves here. Our agent told us that if we saw a listing online for a furnished apartment that was more than a day or two old, the apartment was probably already taken. Despite that, it sounded like it was a bit easier finding a furnished apartment than an unfurnished apartment. Apparently unfurnished apartment viewings take place at a single fixed time, everyone who is interested comes to see it at once, and you need to be ready to put down a deposit on the spot. Luckily the market for furnished apartments is a bit less frenzied, since the only competition is generally other expats or people looking for a pied-à-terre in the city.

The whole process was pretty nerve-wracking, and I had visions of ending up camping out on a mattress with the rats if things didn't work out. I found myself spending time every day looking on every website I could find for new apartments and contacting people to try to schedule viewings. We spent an entire day running around the 3rd, 4th, 10th, 11th and 12th arrondissements with our agent looking at a number of different places. I think we saw nine or ten apartments over the course of a week.

We were pleasantly surprised by most of the apartments we saw, in part because our agent has access to apartment listings that never even make it to the internet. There were some not-so-nice places (like the one with where the bedroom was in a dingy former kitchen, with the tile backsplash still covering portions of the wall) and some nice places with nightmarish aspects (like huge 3-dimensional Harlequin faces emerging from the bathroom tiles). But eventually we found the right place.

Our new home is in an old building, but the apartment has been completely rehabbed. It has a nice kitchen and the bedroom has a closet so large that we call it the dressing room. There are skylights and high ceilings throughout, giving it an open and airy feeling. And best of all, it seems to be 100% rat-free.

Fête des Vendanges de Montmartre

The apartment we are staying in for our first month in Paris is in the 20th arrondissement, in the Montmartre neighborhood. We've been taking a lot of walks around the neighborhood and ran across a tiny vineyard tucked away on the streets behind Sacre Coeur.

When we were back in the apartment later, I looked up the vineyard in the travel guide we brought with us and discovered that the annual harvest festival for the vineyard, la Fête des Vendanges de Montmartre, was taking place the very next weekend.

The festival took place over 5 days and had a wide variety of events, but the one that fit best with our schedules was the parade. There was an elaborate map of the parade route on the festival website that contained times that the parade would be in each zone of the route. The times seemed fairly generous given the very small amount of ground covered, so we arrived at the parade route early, just in case. There were very few people waiting around when we arrived, but it eventually filled in.

The parade was composed of a large number of different groups of people walking and a few people riding in Rolls Royce convertibles, but other than a life-sized cow statue on wheels and a grill on wheels (cooking fish while it was being pulled down the street), there were no floats.

We saw bands . . .

Dancers . . .

And a lot of groups of (mostly older) people wearing matching outfits . . .

The festival website had a list of all of the groups in the parade, which contained a lot of confréries (brotherhoods) devoted to various things from garlic to wine. The confréries would wear matching robes or themed outfits and sometimes medallions.

Some seemed very serious and others were more light-hearted, like one of our favorites, the Confrérie Nationale des Chauves de France (National Brotherhood of the Bald of France), who wore comb medallions and carried a giant comb:

While we were waiting on the parade to make it to our area, people were waiting on the curb and spilling into the street a bit.

But as the parade finally reached us, the crowd pushed into the street, narrowing the parade route and leaving the sidewalk empty.

The parade was pretty slow-moving and groups would end up stopped in front of where we were standing for a while at times. When the parade stopped in between groups, the photographers from the crowd (including my personal photographer) would spill into the middle of the street, hoping for a glimpse of the next group. When the parade started moving again, you would see people come running out of the middle of the street.

We also really enjoyed the number of people we saw that did not appear to be an official part of the parade, but were just walking down the parade route in the middle of the street.

It was a lot of fun and a great way to spend one of our first Saturday afternoons in Paris.