Sold on All Things French

July 17, 2018 / SKL / 14 Comments

I think one of the things I like most about travel is seeing how different things are to the way I do things “back home.” That’s fascinating whether it’s the public toilets, fitting rooms in dress boutiques, how you pay your bill in a restaurant and only about a million other amusing, interesting and intriguing differences to how we all do the same thing.

My French language skills are so rusty you can hear them creaking from a block away but even so I know that Soldes doesn’t mean that the item shown in the display case window has already been sold (it means Sale) but that doesn’t stop me from doing a double-take every time I see the word!

My first reaction is still: Why are they advertising that if it’s no longer available?

How about you? Any amusing anecdotes or impressions you have when you travel?

The Dogged Pursuit of Companionship

July 13, 2018 / SKL / 5 Comments

Can you imagine the patience of this little fellow to wait for however long his mistress needs to do her shopping?

I’m not sure why I’m so fascinated with les chiens d’Aix-en-Provence. Maybe because it’s so unusual for me to see these dogs enjoying this amazing city right along with their owners instead of being cooped up in apartments or houses tucked away in subdivisions which is where mine spends 99% of her life.

Are they just amazingly well-behaved?

Oh, “Sugar” gets the odd walk now and then (and if you knew my dog you’d know how close to the truth that statement cuts) but to imagine doing my shopping or stopping for a cup of coffee with a friend and bringing her along with me? Well, I love seeing that in a perfect world it can actually happen and thought you might too.

This petit garçon is “helping” walk the family dog with his hand on the leash

I wanted to do a post on les chats of Aix too but have been reliably informed that one of the main reasons I haven’t seen a single cat yet on my visit here is because they live on the rooftops of Aix and rarely if ever touch paw to cobblestone!

Still, I’m on the lookout for them and will post straightaway when and if I ever find the little furry French dears. Meanwhile, do you take your pets out with you wherever you go? Love to hear how that works “back home!”

France is a Dog Eat Dog Whirl

March 20, 2017October 18, 2021 / SKL / 8 Comments

I’ve realized that most of the things I write about France inevitably come back to food. This blog post started out about food because that’s where I was—in a very cool little pizza restaurant on a cozy cobblestone alley in Aix-en-Provence—when I was reminded that in France you often share your meal with dogs.

I’ve always had dogs and honestly I don’t love leaving them behind when I go off to go enjoy my human life. (And considering the mild destruction I often return to in the form of ripped magazines and deposits in the middle of the floor (so I’ll be sure not to miss it, you see), they don’t love my leaving them either.)

When I was single, a thousand years ago, my dog Little—a rescue mixed breed terrier—was my constant companion to the point where she always sat on my lap when I had my hair colored (and as a result more than once sported a blob of brown dye on her whitish fur). My hobby at the time was horseback riding and so Little came with me every day and ran alongside me as I rode, rolled in horse manure while I was busy feeding or grooming said horse, and chased the barn cats with rampant glee. Like me, she had a great time.

I always took her with me to friends’ houses, smuggled her into department stores (she wasn’t tiny by any means but she knew how to be quiet in a knapsack), and generally made sure my best friend didn’t spend any time home alone if she didn’t have to. (I also was a freelance copywriter at the time so that worked out for both of us.)

The one place Little couldn’t come with me was to restaurants. Not even outdoor restaurants, at least not in Atlanta in the nineties, and I’d bet not now either.

But France has always had an open door policy with les chiens and I totally love that about them. How nice it must be to relax with a glass of wine, your dog at your feet, the evening before you and no concern about having to hose down your living room when you get home.

This dog is looking for more of those tasty pommes frites that the waiter dropped five minutes earlier!

Now my current dog (one of two) is a certifiable ratbag and I’d honestly spend too much time trying to make her behave than enjoying my moules frites but I think I might actually be motivated to train her up if I thought there were more places I could bring her.

In France, I’m reminded that these little animals are considered acceptable, viable companions and all the interactions I saw between them and any of their owners reinforced that notion.

After all, in a civilized world would you really leave your best friend at home all alone while you went out for your aperos and foie gras?

Hey, next blog post I’m going to tell you what I’ve noticed about the pigeons of Provence! Until then, mes amis, á bientôt!

NB: for my Maggie Newberry readers, my dog Little was the model for Maggie’s precious little Petit-Four.

Blast from the Past

February 27, 2017October 18, 2021 / SKL / 6 Comments

I’m currently on the brink of another visit to Aix-en-Provence and I’m reminded of one of the major reasons I enjoy visiting France so much—particularly out of season.

The boulangerie in our village always had odd cookies--at least odd to American children--but that made it all the more amazing to us.

The boulangerie in our village always had odd cookies–at least odd to American children–but that just made it all the more amazing to us.

AFour years ago, I took a trip to Germany and Switzerland with an all-male entourage of two brothers, my husband and son.

My brothers hadn’t been back to Europe in years. My youngest brother hadn’t been back since he was nine years old when my father was stationed Stateside after three years in France and Germany. I mention this because until that trip I assumed that I was attracted to certain places for similar reasons that anybody else was—I loved France because of the lilt of the language, the amazing pastries, the quaint cobblestone streets. And since I’d heard other people gush on about those qualities too I assumed we were all on the same page for why we loved to visit Europe.

But it wasn’t until I went back with two of the people I’d grown up with that I realized that I had a hidden trigger that was personal and special when it came to Europe. I can’t even say I share this particular proclivity with people who grew up in Europe because it was the very point of feeling foreign—at nine years old—that not only made the experience so much more intense but also indelible.

At one point in our trip, we were in Murren in the Swiss Alps. We’d spent the night there and were up early the next morning for a walking trek we all wanted to take. This was early June but when we woke up there was snow on the ground in the village. My brothers and I happened to be the first ones up and as we waited for my husband and son, we three stepped outside into the cold.

Instantly, I detected a familiar scent—one I’d smelled on and off during my travels—and one that was exactly like the air on any winter’s day in Ars-sur-Moselle, the village where I lived as a child.

A street in Ars-sur-Moselle...my walk to school in fact

A street in Ars-sur-Moselle…my walk to the convent school in fact!

The scent was a mixture of burning coal, diesel fuel and urine. I’m sure it’s common in most villages—especially in the days a scant twenty years after the war.

The minute I smelled it, I saw both my brothers snap their heads around and look at each other with their mouths open.

They remembered it too.

“It’s Ars,” they both said at the same time. “It smells just like Ars.”

They hadn’t smelled anything like it in fifty years. But the second they did they were instantly transported back to the rolling hills and streets of our little Alsatian village with all the play and carefree adventure that our childhood could hold.

My middle brother Kevin with a French pal at our house in Ars

When my husband and son came out, they confirmed that they didn’t smell anything particularly unusual but even so I noticed my son wrinkled his nose. He smelled it, but it didn’t mean anything to him beyond being vaguely unpleasant.

My two brothers and I had just had a snapshot visit from the past, one as dramatic and real as a surprise meeting with a ghost.

It was then that I realized that a good part of my fascination with Europe was my desire to connect with my childhood—those happy memories that live in my mind—and are only released by a strange, indefinable fragrance (hey, sometimes the scents are pleasant!) or the random way the sun glimmers off wet dark roof tiles—all the things we noticed as children but stopped seeing as adults.

When you’re in a foreign environment, everything is so different from your usual daily round that the smallest things leap out at you. You tend to really see things. (And smell them.)

Me (age 10) and my father at the Frankfurt Zoo (Air Force issue glasses! Zut alors!)

Maybe that’s another reason so many of us like to travel. Travel helps you see the world through a child’s eyes again. But for me, I now know there’s another reason, a much more personal reason—and why China or Hawaii or Singapore—as lovely as those places are—don’t cut it for me in the true wonder department.

For me, being in France or Germany really does feel a little bit like coming home again.

How about you? Anybody else able to pinpoint the particular wonder and joy of being someplace that reminds them of another place, another time?

On being thankful…

November 21, 2016October 18, 2021 / SKL / 6 Comments

This post is a re-tread from 4 years ago and I’m astonished at how much has not changed. While we no longer live in Atlanta, my mother is now 93, not 87 and my son is wrapping up a Masters degree in engineering, not starting college as he was in the original post, the important bits are the same–mainly the intense gratitude I feel for all that I have: my friends and family, my country, my hope for the future, and my thankfulness for today.

It’s Monday afternoon. I spent some time this weekend marveling over the gorgeous fall colors all over Atlanta—a full month later than they’ve ever shown up before. Today I also note that the cooler fall weather has finally come to Atlanta which doesn’t matter because my husband and I will soon be packing up the car and heading south for Thanksgiving as we do every year.

Inside the house, the fireplace has been burning all day. My day has been full of last-minute freelance projects—received late and needing to be done early on top of cooking, cleaning and editing my latest novel.

And I am so thankful.

I am thankful for the chance to write books for a living. I’m grateful for a cozy little house, and for four non-psycho pets who enhance my life, for friends, for a smooth transition of my only child’s introduction to his first semester at college and for my own relatively successful entrée into the world of the empty nest.

Tomorrow my husband and I will drive six hours to my mother’s house in Florida for Thanksgiving. My older brother and his wife have come from northern California, my son will come from his campus fifty miles south of his grandmother’s house. My other brothers will come, loaded down with ham and pies and photos to share and stories to tell. I am thankful that we will have the whole family together again for another year.

My husband and I will bring the dressing as we do every year, the recipe handed down from my father—gone now these past 25 years—and one I have enjoyed for nearly every Thanksgiving and Christmas of my life. We shopped Trader Joes and Whole Foods and the local markets in my Atlanta neighborhood for ingredients and specialty items that we buy only once a year. We picked up bottles of Beaujolais Nouveau, tins of holiday cookies and candied nuts. This afternoon, as I fried the sausage for the dressing, I thought how lucky I am to be able to buy all this food, to not have to think twice about obtaining the things I felt I needed to make our family’s feast.

I am most thankful that we will all be together for the first time in a year. Through all the health scares, the employment woes, the insecurities, the stresses—both financial and emotional—I can’t forget how lucky we all are to have each other. I know my mother, 89 this year, will sparkle for as long as all her chicks—every one present and accounted for—are gathered in her house. I know this time won’t last forever and that one of these Thanksgivings, we won’t all be together. I know how lucky I am, and how grateful I am for Thanksgiving 2012.

Finally, regardless of how you felt about the outcome of the recent elections, I think you have to be truly thankful to live in a place where the threat of bombs and tanks and guns does not exist. This week, when you spare a thought—among the table settings and turkey drumsticks and football schedules—for those families on both sides of the Gaza/Israel border, I think, like myself, you have to be grateful for our country and for the peace that most of us have always known.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

When Memory Lane is Land-Mined…

September 6, 2016October 18, 2021 / SKL / 7 Comments

There was a best-selling novel a few years ago called “The Thirteenth Tale” in which the protagonist states that everyone mythologizes his or her childhood. I think there’s some truth to that but I have to say there was a three-year period in my childhood when I didn’t need to embellish the things that happened to me.

I was nine years old the first time my brother placed a live bomb in my hands. It was the Sixties and I was living in post-war France with my parents and three brothers. My dad was the acting commanding officer at Chambley Air Force Base, an American air base situated in Alsace-Lorraine that had originally been used by the Luftwaffe during the German occupation.

Chambley was war-damaged and geographically remote (basically, it was no where near Paris) but after the war it was deemed ideal for the purposes of the United States Air Force who, under NATO, flew its F-86 jet fighters from there during the Cold War.

The unexploded bombs my brothers and I found—and we found dozens during the year we lived in France—were the result of an Allied bombardment in November 1945 when the 8th Air Force dropped 3,753 tons of bombs in our backyard in one day… resulting in the ultimate scavenger hunt 20 years later for four Boomer kids.

A few other memories in my scrapbook from the time include:

The fact that I attended the girls-only village convent school—built in the 1300’s—which had no toilets but a very nice straw-filled outdoor stall.
My first kiss which I got from a French boy (named Laurent) in a stone washhouse built by the Romans in 300 AD.
Being shot at by an angry French farmer who patrolled his vineyards in an effort to keep out pests (i.e, wily American kids)
Playing a game in the hills with my French pals that involved teasing wild boars with rocks and sticks until they chased you intent on ripping you to bloody pieces. (Fun!)

Gosh! What a fun playhouse! Wouldn’t you want YOUR children frolicking here among the vipers & wild boars?

I once tripped over a dead body in a snake-infested World War II bunker that my brother and I discovered and were trying to fix up for a clubhouse. (The Mouseketeers was real big back then.) It was a skeleton, wearing a molding German uniform. (Showing an early entrepreneurial streak, my brother tacked up a sign at the entrance to the bunker to sell tours to the local French kids—”Ten francs to see the dead kraut.”)

When my father was later transferred to Germany, I had a full-scale castle in my backyard—built in the 1200’s—complete with dungeons, stone balconies and crenulated towers—that my brothers and I played in almost every day of the two years that we lived there.

We moved back to the States when I was 12 at which point I began a fairly conventional adolescence, but I’ll always be grateful that there was a time in my childhood when I was not only allowed to discover the world on my own terms but was able to experience history and true adventure as a part of my daily round.

How about you?
Anybody else have a few years of your childhood that would make a decent adventure story? Love to hear!

Is Paris Drowning?

June 5, 2016October 18, 2021 / SKL / 8 Comments

Excuse the hyperbolic headline but I couldn’t resist. With most media headlines and startling photos all over the Internet these days about the flooding in Paris—happening smack dab in the middle of prime tourist season—the City of Light has been on my mind too much these days not to write about it.

Paris, France – June 01, 2016: Seine river water flooding after major rainfalls.

The thing that truly horrifies me is not so much that this beloved city is dog paddling like crazy trying to hold it’s head above water or that it’s being forced to make emergency runs to rescue the best bits from the Louvre and the d’Orsay—although that’s bad enough. I understand when natural disasters happen and there’s nothing for it. That’s life.

These. Things. Happen.

No, that’s not the thing I hate to see the most about Paris treading water during the biggest tourist month in their calendar year.

I hate that Americans are using the floods as one more reason why they won’t visit.

This is a one-two punch for Paris after the November attacks. I know it’ll rebound. After all, it’s Paris. But it makes it so much harder to overcome, to clean up, to rebuild, when they lose the tourist dollars that let’s face it, are integral to helping Paris stay…well, Paris.

While I love being in Paris any month of the year, it seems like I’ve tended to be there in June the most.

June is a great time to jaunt over to Normandy because it’s an easy day trip and being American I like the idea of visiting the D-Day beaches around the anniversary dates of the landings.

June isn’t blazing hot yet so if your hotel doesn’t have AC—and some of the really charming ones don’t—it doesn’t matter. It’s still comfortable for sitting out with an apéro and watching the street life, or taking a cruise down the Seine or just relaxing by the fountain in the Tuileries.

Okay technically this is Aix-en-Provence but you get the idea. Oui, c’est moi and oh how I wish I were there this June!

Plus June is when all the best veggies and fruits are busting out all over the great food markets in Paris. Again, not to take anything away from October or Christmastime or April (OMG can anyone take anything away from springtime in Paris?) but June flower and food markets pretty much trump any other month and in any other place.

I know some people think I’m weird because I see all these photos of the river rising around the Seine embankment stairs on the Ile de la Cité and people coasting down city streets in little rubber boats and I still ache to be there.

Floods or not, whacko terrorists or not, the City of Light draws me.

What about you? Glad you dodged a bullet by not being there this summer? Or wishing you were there anyway—maybe somewhere on high ground—with a café crème in one hand and a pain au chocolat in the other? Like maybe the Eiffel Tower? I hear it’s still open. One thing is sure, you’ll definitely keep your feet dry!

(I’m including a blog post by one of my favorite bloggers, French Girl in Seattle, which was written a few days after the terrorist attacks last November but which is an open love letter to Paris—and I thought the Grande Dame could use a little love at the moment!)

10 ways to bring France into your life

February 20, 2016October 18, 2021 / SKL / 6 Comments

Since my husband and I’ve decided to skip a year before returning to France—which has nothing to do with the fear of getting blown up and everything to do with paying down our mortgage—I’ve been more desperate than usual to get my France Fix. As a result I’ve spent a good deal of time researching how to feel like you’re in France when you’re not, and and I’m happy to present to you my ten foolproof ways of feeling like you’re in France until the happy day when you can actually be there.

Eat French. This might be my favorite. Eating comme les françaises is more than just marcarons and brioche (as lovely as they both are.) Eating French is a way of eating. The French have a ritualistic attitude toward eating. They believe that taking the time to set a pretty table and stylishly presenting the food is nearly as important as the food itself.

Dress French. Simple, elegant, never trendy, always vogue. I remember my mother telling me when I was young that even shop girls in Paris dressed beautifully because they would save their money to buy one single thing of value—like a gorgeous belt or an Hermés scarf—and that one thing would boost the look of any outfit they wore with it. While this link to une femme d’un certain âge is a favorite French fashion site for French women “of a certain age,” I do believe that true French style is timeless and much of what the blogger purports would work for any age.

Read French. I don’t mean the language here. I mean English language magazines and newsletters about France. Or come to that, books that “take” you there. Examples would be any of the Maggie Newberry Mysteries of course, but also A Paris Apartment, or David Lebovitz’s The Sweet Life in Paris. Trust me, you’ll feel like you were just there!

Talk French. Join a language club, preferably in your town (as opposed to online) so you can fumble your way through conversations in preparation for the happy day when you do it for real in France. There’s nothing that says someday I’ll go back like falling asleep to the sounds of French phrases floating through your head.

Act French. Check out this video since it pretty much tells it all.

Walk French. A recent magazine article I read compared two women’s lifestyles—one a Parisian and one an American—for one month. The American worked out like a maniac, depended on processed and fast food and semi-starved herself to stay slim. The French woman kept her weight down by exercising organically (as it happened naturally in her day) and by preparing three meals a day and not snacking. So for example, instead of beginning her day on the elliptical like the American did, the Parisian walked twenty blocks to her office. She waved hello to the people along the way, stopped and picked up a baguette to add to her lunch and enjoyed the weather no matter what it was. Lo and behold the article revealed that both the American gym-rat and the Parisian ended up at the same weight. But the American was grumpy and stressed out while the Parisian tended to have a more upbeat outlook on life.

Kiss French. I’m not sure this works here but I couldn’t resist.

Hear French I once got hooked on Patrick Bruel during a summer I spent hanging out at UCLA many years ago. For that whole summer, I felt an unmistakable aura of Frenchness because of the music I was listening to. Whether it’s music or audio tapes and podcasts—or listening to the news in French—even if you don’t understand what they’re saying, it will make you feel like you’re there. (Come to think of it, that’s usually how I feel when I’m there—not understanding a word of what’s being spoken around me. Hmmmm. Best get back to those French language tapes.)

See French Watch a movie—either in French with English subtitles or Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. Either one will do the trick in ninety minutes or less.

Smell French Let’s face it: France, as a country, smells amazing. Close your eyes and imagine walking by the front door of any boulangerie in Paris (and they’re on practically every street corner). Does anything smell better than pastries? Plus, Paris is the only city I’ve been to where I do a double take with the women I pass on the sidewalk because no self-respecting Frenchwoman goes outside without wearing perfume.

Lavender! Buy it by the bags and put it everywhere! Pillows, lingerie drawers, your purse…

The cafés smell of fresh brewed coffee, and all of Provence is redolent with the scent of lavender. To pull it off here in the States, just bury your nose in a lavender sachet (or grow your own in a pot!) before squirting on a blast of Chanel No. 5. You’ll enjoy the feeling of being in France all day long.

I hope these ten things made you feel a little more like you were in France but if you want to ramp it up a notch you can move on to ordering chocolates from Patrick Roger, overnighting stationery from Gilbert Jeune, or just going ahead and putting down the deposit on that Aix or Nice or Paris apartment rental for next year. What the heck. You know you’re going to do it eventually.

So did it help? Did I move you one step closer to feeling like you were in France? Do I need to do ten more steps? Because I think I can manage that…

In case you didn’t get enough, check out my French Store page for more ideas to make you feel like you’re in France!

My Paris. No Matter What.

December 31, 2015October 18, 2021 / SKL / 6 Comments

I waited as long as I could.

I held off writing this post to get some distance from November 13 and also because there were already so many other really good comments on what happened in blogs and online news magazines that I follow and respect. As a lot of you know, I had just returned from Paris when the violence hit. I was immediately flooded with emails and texts from family and friends—most whom knew full well I was home and safe—but I think they just needed to reach out.

When something like this happens—tragic and senseless in a world so many of us work hard to structure and frame to fit our lives—I think a lot of people inevitably think of how it would feel if it had been a loved one of theirs sitting in Le Petit Cambodge that night, or who’d gone off to a concert full of good spirits and bonhomie.

My husband on a sunny, cool morning at one of the flea markets.

When I look at the photos from my trip of the cafés I visited or the bookshops I wandered through, I can’t help but think that the last thing on my mind when I was there was that I might get shot. When I think back on that one perfect Friday—one week before the terrible one—when I strode down boulevard Haussmann on my way to Le Printemps for a blissful afternoon of shopping with magic sprinkled on every moment—it’s inconceivable that such determined ugliness could have been hiding down one of the picturesque alleyways.

When I look at the mind blowing Christmas decorations at Gallerie Lafayette—which I
saw three years ago on my birthday and the enchantment of which still hasn’t worn off—I can’t help but think what a perfect target it is. Because it’s beautiful and exists largely to enchant.

Le Printemps: The ultimate shopping experience

So much of my life back home is utilitarian and structured to enable me more easily to get things done. But the idea of Paris isn’t like that. The idea of Paris is unnecessary perfection, of superfluous beauty.

Did you know there are lights hidden all along many of the bridges in Paris? And when it gets dark they light up so you can still see the exquisite details of the architecture? And even then only if you’re on a boat traveling under it? What other city do you know is show lighted—not so you can find your way around but so you can appreciate the details of its beauty even after dark?

This last time when I walked down its beautiful boulevards, lined on both sides by the classic Haussmann buildings that have defined Paris architecture for two hundred years, I saw so many things that had to have been created for the sole purpose to delight.

At one point when I was spending too much time in a perfume shop across from the Louvre (is there really such a thing as spending too much time in a perfume shop?) my husband—who was waiting outside—had the opportunity to note a very special design on the façade of the Louvre that he’d never seen before. Honestly, unless you were a bored husband waiting for your wife in a perfume shop or somebody just sitting in a café with the whole day at his feet, you probably wouldn’t even notice.

But it’s there. Waiting for you to see and marvel. Subtle and perfect. Like Paris itself.

The main purpose of this latest trip to Paris was to research the mystery I was writing which takes place in the Latin Quarter and centers around the German occupation at the time. Because of that I’ve read a good deal—both fiction and nonfiction—about the time period. After the November attacks, I couldn’t help but draw an indelible connection between what ISIS is doing and what Hitler did.

I spent a good deal of time this last trip wandering over ancient cobblestones, winding my way through the narrow alleys of the Latin Quarter, reading plaques that talked about young people who were shot down in the last days of the liberation of Paris, seeing bullet holes embedded in the stone façades of the beautiful Haussmann buildings, and reading signs that intoned how whole groups of people were murdered in the square by the Nazis. I shivered to think of this graceful and elegant city and how it had endured such terror.

Little did I know.

I’m not political but I think it’s safe to say that most normal people are against the kind of evil demonstrated by the monsters who destroyed so many lives in Paris on November 13. And I know why they continue to attack Paris as opposed to San Francisco or Miami or Seville—or even London.

It’s because killing innocent people isn’t enough for these kinds of terrorists. Robbing children of parents and vice-versa, ripping families and friends apart, of handicapping healthy happy people mentally and physically—that’s not enough for them.

They want to destroy the very essence of the good life. And where else in the world is that more true than in Paris? If you wanted to make a statement against the one place on earth that exists largely to give people pleasure, you’d have to pick Paris.

And I certainly will, time and time again, no matter what.

The Week of Living Normally

October 22, 2015October 18, 2021 / SKL / 4 Comments

The view from our apartment window.

The plan was simple. Go to Paris for two weeks so you can spend the first week doing all the irresistible tourist stuff you can’t not do no matter how many times you come here. (And yes it takes a full week just to do the minimum.) Normally my husband and I hit all the sights and museums and then drag ourselves exhausted and bleary-eyed back onto the airplane when the week’s up to head back to our daily round and life back home.

Not this time baby.

This time I was smart.
I booked us—for the first time since our honeymoon 25 years ago—two weeks in Paris. Yesterday we finished the first week of walking everywhere in town. (Fitbit claims we averaged 13K steps a day. If only exercise was so effortless back home!) We’ve hit every chocolate shop, stuffed down pain au chocolat at every boulangerie on every corner–even when we weren’t hungry—(what’s hunger got to do with it?) and made lunch a bigger deal than Henry VIII in his great hall.

On literally every street corner…

We went back to the old haunts so we could reminisce (“Oh! Remember when John Patrick was little and he fed the sparrows here in front of Notre Dame?”) and to visit favorite restaurants and neighborhoods for that sense of familiarity and—in the case of Paris—awe.

So now we’re ready to be normal.

Except I’m not sure, after three years of the kind of work schedule both my husband and I’ve had, if we know what that means. My first inclination is to say, “Let’s look it up on Google! I’ll type in normal and see what we get.” That got us nowhere. (Although I’m glad to report we’re nowhere near normal.)

Le Roi du Pot au Feu! And trust me, they don’t lie.

But one thing I knew was that waking up at ten every morning and eating flaky pastries two hours before a gargantuan lunch was not normal. For the last seven days I’ve told myself that a year of tuna salad sandwiches and yoghurt cups await me back home so eating pot au feu TWICE in four days was okay. (Honestly, I still don’t see the problem with it.)

But being normal for this last week in Paris is important to me. While not the reason for the trip (that’s to research my current novel) it is the whole point of coming for two weeks. The second week is the part where we stop feeling like tourists and start feeling like we live here! And eating big heavy lunches every day and a pound of artisan chocolate doesn’t fulfill that—even for a Parisian.

So today I’ll get up early, work for a couple of hours in the morning then wander about the neighborhood just to wander. I’ll go hang out at a café and people watch, and not see a single thing all day that’s famous or is featured on a postcard. I’ll take pictures (covertly) of the every day things that will remind me of this week-as-a-Parisian (because after all I do know my time here is finite and the Florida suburbs await me). I’ll eat when I’m hungry and stay my hand on all the amazing and omnipresent sweets—just like I’d do “normally.”

Instead of endlessly revisiting Notre Dame or the Eiffel Tower, I’ll memorize the bones of the beautiful Haussmann apartment buildings that line almost every avenue in every neighborhood I walk through and I’ll watch the faces of the Parisians hurrying by. I’ll concentrate on the fragrance of the coffee in the cafés, the rolling burrs of the natives speaking all around me, and I won’t look at my blasted smart phone once.

Well. Just to get the GPS coordinates to find my way back to the apartment of course. I mean getting lost is fun with you’re twenty years old but I’m wearing very fashionable ankle boots with two-inch heels on cobblestones here. (A lot of things may have changed in Paris since you were here last but trust me on this, Parisian women are not running around Paris in sneakers.)

So wish me luck on being “normal” in Paris this week. I’ll report back as to my success. Who knows? If I can manage it here, I might try it back home too. I mean, that’s the perspective shift we all get from going on vacation, right? The way we can see our lives back home so much more clearly? And then make the changes to fix the things you didn’t even know needed fixing?