If you’ve decided to stay in Paris long term, you may become interested in owning rather than renting. In Part One of this two-part series, I outlined how to find your ideal property. Now, as you follow your dream of … Continue reading
Life in Paris
Finding Your Dream Home in Paris Part I: Location, Location, Location
If you’ve made the decision to stay for the long haul in Paris, you should be thinking about purchasing your primary residence. As a friend once said to me, paying rent is money thrown away. In spite of rent control, … Continue reading
What It’s Like Living In The “Worst” Part Of Paris
It’s no secret that finding an apartment is difficult in Paris. People don’t realize how small this city is. For comparison, London is 600 square miles while Paris is 40 square miles. Consider this, and then remember how much space … Continue reading
Getting a Paris Apartment: My Story
Stephanie shows by this article that you don’t always have to have your plans figured out before you get here, as long as you’re willing to hustle a bit. 🙂 -SH The many expats I’ve met in Paris all seem … Continue reading
Why I Left Paris
It’s coming up on a year since I moved out of my favorite city and enough time has passed to share my perspective on the move publicly. If you had told me in March 2020 that I would ever, ever … Continue reading
How Paris Quietly Became a Bike City
When I moved to Paris in 2013 one of the first things I did was obtain a Navigo card and after a couple of months of buying monthly passes manually via machines I switched to an annual pass and have … Continue reading
The Trottinette Life in Paris
I first looked into a trottinette (what the French call the platform-with-wheels-and-a-stick electric scooters) in January 2020, in the throes of yet another transportation strike (oh, for those good old days when strikes were our big problems!). I wasn’t alone. … Continue reading
Getting Pickpocketed
So I’ve been pickpocketed three times in the seven years that I’ve been in Paris. Once in 2015 and twice in the last quarter of 2019, when pickpocketing was at an all-time high in the city. Nothing irreplaceable was taken; it … Continue reading
Notre Drame: the Fire
I was in a train back into Paris from Frankfurt when the news started to trickle in about our disaster here in Paris. We’ve had various shocks during the time I’ve lived here, whether it was terrorist attacks in years … Continue reading
Pinch Me, I Live in Paris
There are hundreds of postcards I’ve made of Paris in my mind. I’ll stop, clear my head of whatever I was thinking of, and be truly and appreciatively, in the moment. A soft sunset on Île de la Cité seen … Continue reading