The Expat Life

Alas, my life as an expatriate in Paris doesn't involve much drinking in cafes with dissolute writers of arguable genius (obviously, I was never much enchanted with Hemingway- there, I said it).  But it has come with a few distinct advantages.

Chief among these is the expat community itself.  To know what being a part of an expat community is like, I want you to think back on your first week of college.  Remember that time when you could strike up a conversation with anybody because you knew that, like you, they were in uncharted territory and in desperate need of friends?  Remember all the small-talk you exchanged over regional differences, like who says "pop" and who says "soda"?  The number of times you told people your prospective majors, and the number of times you pretended to stay interested after they told you that they were majoring in business?  Keep the "interesting regional difference" conversation, replace "prospective majors" with "irritating quirks about life abroad (double points for complaints about the French bureaucracy)," and you've got the talk soup of your average expat gathering.  

And unlike your first week of college, that openness to meeting new people lasts indefinitely because there are always new expats arriving and old ones leaving.  And while sometimes this can be a major bummer (I sometimes feel like every time I make a friend, they turn around and go back to the States), I choose to see this as something great:  the Ferris-wheel rotation of Americans in Paris seems to bring in someone new and interesting for every wonderful person that it takes away.

One of my chief worries (and one of the questions I most often fielded) when I found out I was moving to Paris was, "but how will you meet people?  What will you do without your friends?".  Let me be clear:  being far away from the people that I've known and loved since I was knee-high to a pig's eye is no picnic. But I would be in a similar quandary no matter where I moved.  And at least in Paris, there's this fantastic club of people waiting to embrace you.  It doesn't matter if you can throw a football, or speak intelligently about the work of Pablo Neruda, or if you can quilt.  The only club rule is that you speak English.  If you speak English, you're in like flint with an interesting, multi-national, eclectic group of people who can't wait to be your friend.  I doubt I would've had that waiting for me in Cleveland.