Arrival in Paris
The following article continues the saga of my Leap of Faith, which turned out to be my journey from lawyer to coach. This article was originally published in the Orlando Sentinel in 1999.
Arrival in Paris
A year in France sounded like a reasonable antidote for the forty-something mid-life crises of a couple from Houston. Because Jim and I had minimal travel experience in France and minimal French language skills, we made a trial move to Paris for one month. It started out well. When we landed at the airport, we breezed through customs and immigration so easily that we did not recognize the process had occurred until we found ourselves at the street exit.
Then, unlike in New York, our cab driver spoke a little English. He took us straight to the furnished apartment we had rented for about $1800 a month, despite the fact that we could hardly pronounce the name of the small street, and could only tell him that it was in the 17th Arrondissement. Already life was so different from home.
We found our small one-bedroom apartment nicely decorated, and it even resembled its picture on the Internet. The kitchen and the bathroom were so tiny that they were cute. (We knew from talking to seasoned travelers and researching floor plans on the Internet, that apartments in Paris were small.) In France most major kitchen appliances are in miniature. Our dishwasher barely accommodated breakfast and lunch dishes. We had to stoop to peer into the refrigerator. We had an understanding that he who cooks doesn’t clean up, because there really wasn’t room for two people in the kitchen at the same time. We just bumped into each other a lot.
The bathroom had barely enough room for both me and my reflection in the mirror. […]