Canada is a good place to live and work. I like it too.
But deep down, I still feel safer in France.
Canada is a good place to live and work. I like it too.
But deep down, I still feel safer in France.
"Just between us, have you ever seen a fifty-something guy completely naked but with a face mask on?"
Are we selfish, ignorant, arrogant, dumb or just realistic, practical and hedonistic human beings trying to handle the situation the best we can?
Sometimes, I wonder if 2020 is a marketing strategy that spiralled out of control, like some kind of viral campaign designed to make us rediscover and appreciate life’s little pleasures that went way...
“Why are you so stressed out? It’s just France!”
“And it’s just a pandemic, remember?”
“So what?”
So, this trip is complicated, Mark.
Sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean, July 2020 Who on earth travels in a middle of the pandemic? Aren’t borders closed? Us. And yes… but no. Mark just passed out on the TGV a few minutes after the train...
The TV was switched off... Michel Giannesini, 91 years old, former sound engineer and one of the first people to sell TVs in France left us on April 25, 2020.
“Are you bringing any food into Canada?”
No.
Seriously, I’m not.
The border officer eyes me suspiciously, waiting for me to admit I have five kilos of blue cheese and foie gras in my backpack.
It’s a typical trip back to Canada. We got up at 9:30 a.m., got dressed and left 15 minutes later because I believe in the “ripping the bandage off fast” technique.
I had plans for the summer. I was going to solve all the issues my family is facing, then relax, write a manuscript or two, work as usual, be the perfect mother and spend some quality time with Feng.
It felt like the end of the summer last week but it should have been its peak. And now, summer holidays are actually ending for most French, including us, and it’s suddenly hot again.
“One parent, one language,” she started lecturing me. “My husband only speaks English to our son and I only speak my mother tongue to him. And now, he’s bilingual!”
I’m often bemused by the common, everyday problems my French family face and apparently can’t solve. But now I'm one of them, a French with a stupid, impossible-to-fix issue.
August 15 (Assumption of Mary into Heaven) is a statutory holiday in France and in Nantes, over the long weekend, there were a lot of people wandering aimlessly, looking for entertainment.
I always forget how common it is to see French people engage in verbal and physical fights. As I’m typing this, it’s 3:15 a.m. on a rainy Sunday night and I can hear three or four voices shouting...
Half of France is complaining about the weather—the one who worked in July and decided to take August off—but it’s still business as usual when it rains in France.
Feng left today. At 10 a.m., I walked him to the bus station. He was in travel mode, focused on the upcoming journey back to Canada, and I was half-asleep—we didn’t speak much.
This year, the first mission was to buy two French SIM cards and prepaid plans to use our smartphone during the trip.
I knew I was supposed to marvel at paintings and sculptures—and I did for the first twenty minutes of the visit—but I was too tired to focus on anything in particular.
I was a bit wary of Paris in the summer. The months of July and August are prime tourist season in one of the most popular destinations in Europe and one of the most famous in the world.
Checkout was at noon and we had tickets for the 4:43 p.m. Paris-Nantes TGV, so we were free until 4 p.m.—the Montparnasse railway station was just two subway stops or a fifteen-minute walk from the...
Formula for a perfect day? No plans, just hope for the best.
Getting lost on purpose and finding your way around a big city is a fun exercise, especially in a very walkable and absolutely fascinating place like Paris.
I wonder if five or ten years from now, we will refer to summer 2019 as “you know, this fucked up summer when we visited Paris twice just because.”
