L'Appart: The Delights and Disasters of Making My Paris Home

In France, being exigeant, or discriminating, is considered a positive quality, as is complaining: both put vendors on alert that you expect the best.

We followed the stairs down to the cave, which is found under every building in Paris. Most caves are used for storage, although there’s been a recent interest in converting them to living spaces. The two-level apartments are similar to a duplex, but because they’re partially sous-sol (underground), they’re cleverly called a sousplexe.

The double-digit arrondissements are more diverse, and each has a distinct feel. Being more working class, there’s a greater sense of community. Some are certainly less polished than the single-digit arrondissements, with narrow streets and passages instead of grand avenues, but they have a more neighborhood feel.

When you live in Paris for more than a couple of years, you see a lot of people come, and you see a lot of them go. It’s a great city to visit for a week, or even a few months, traipsing from museum to café to pastry shop, tearing into baguettes, and capping off the day with steak frites in a bistro with a remarkably decent pitcher of vin rouge mai

Paris was always Paris, and the French were…well, the French. But because of what happened—j’avais mûri, I had “ripened,” as they say. Living abroad, I learned and acclimated to different ways of doing things. Sometimes it’s learning not to touch the produce at the market. Other times, it’s going into a situation expecting the worst, instead of the

Being pushy is something that took me a while to get used to, because it’s not in my nature. With service in France sometimes at a minimum, though, if you’re not getting the response or help you want, you’ve got to prod and push—sometimes hard—to get what you need. We also start off on a decidedly different foot: Americans go into situations expect

Like Sicilians, who don’t have a verb tense to describe the future, the French aren’t so adept at imagining other possibilities. With soup plates that are only for soup and salad forks that can only be used for salads, the French get locked into how things should be, rather than seeing how they could be. That strategy is great for preserving the gr

Everything is negotiable in France, which means everything has value. But in France, the currency that has the most value is information. Getting it is a delicate skill, because it’s not always easy to obtain.

The French, who often get a bum rap for being soft, are tougher than we give them credit for. I don’t know if I’ll ever make the full-on transition to being French, in spite of my folders bulging with nearly a decade and a half of electric bills (and now, three substantial binders of construction devis, factures, and bons de livraison). But I’ve le