France
A Tale of One of the Two Most Shorted Posts
Oh Paris, City of Light, City of Love…
…and, as legend (rumor?) has it, one of the two most shorted posts in the Foreign Service because of the distance between families’ expectations and the reality of day-to-day life in a big, expensive city.
And yet, such mismatched expectations are hardly limited to Americans dreaming of spending two or three years sipping red wine and noshing on baguettes. According to several news reports, the Japanese Embassy has a 24-hour hotline for tourists visiting Paris who succumb to something dubbed, “Paris Syndrome,” which is said to be a full-on psychological condition for those feeling devastating levels of disappointment that takes culture shock to new heights.
And that was long before Emily in Paris.
While I can wrap my brain around some level of underwhelm, I never idolized Paris in such a way as to be at any risk of earth-shattering let down. Ironically for the purposes here, growing up, my foreign culture obsession was Japan. I LOVED everything Japanese culture, art, kimono. I didn’t make it to Japan until I was 34 and on a super short work trip (and a second similar time—but this Christmas, three weeks!), so I had already seen enough of the world, and the other most shorted post (Rome), so as to have a better appreciation for what makes a good/better/best city, and what is probably just not in the cards for anywhere on the planet.
My first trip to Paris came as a broke graduate student on a scholarship and a stipend. As such, getting out of Dublin and away from the rain for a bit provided plenty of joy, and the crowds at the Louvre didn’t bother me anywhere near as much as they would years later when I returned. I still went starry-eyed at first sight of artistic masterpieces featured in my high school textbooks, and I found Tuileries to be downright charming. The budget hotels and flights sat on par with my experiences elsewhere, and my only cringe moment came at the costs of going up the Eiffel Tower, which I skipped.
My second trip took on an entirely different character. BRAND newly pregnant, I came to town for a quick set of work meetings, which meant that I stayed at an Embassy-selected hotel on a per diem allowance (yay!). Said boutique hotel boasted the swankiest atmosphere I’d ever entered (by a country mile). One evening, I stepped into the elevator with my husband, and in floated (not walked, floated) two Ama-freaking-zonian super models straight off the catwalk set up in the hotel’s lobby for an intimate fashion show. Never in my blessed life—both before, and kindly thereafter—have I ever felt so ragingly insecure as a female.
I full on laughed out loud. Not a cute chuckle, oh heavens no, a full-on awkward snort-meets-guffaw at the foreign sensation of existing in the same space as two creatures who possesses 46 chromosomes per cell but who, by any other accounting, must have surely been spawned by a different species.
That moment aside, Paris when you have money is an altogether different experience than Paris as a student. Sadly unable to imbibe, I crushed every croissant I could find. No macaron was safe from what I was more than happy to declare my tiny embryo-on-board demanded. Sugar-induced heart palpitations be damned! A colleague posted to Paris hosted us for dinner, and her flat still impresses; none of my three tours nabbed me a pad that palatial, and for both Bangkok and Beijing, I held the same rank as she did there. [I, however, totally did better on the inexpensive household help!]
But this time, the mass of humanity at the Louvre struck me as crushing, but I sprang for the time and logistical expense of a day trip to Versailles. Walking be a packed Hermes store, I lamented that I’d have liked to go in to browse, as I had in Prada during my first trip to Rome with my college doe eyes, but again, the CROWDS.
Nothing about a wall of people and their noise says luxury to a morning sickness-plagued introvert.
As I reflect on the starkly opposite manners in which I traipsed through Paris’s streets, I find myself wondering how I want my own daughter to first experience it.
Let’s be real, my son is, and will always be, oblivious.
Do I have her go first on her own dime and then swoop in to show her how it can be done for round two? Do I let her plan for us as a pair on a budget but then drop a couple of awesome treats? Do we go as a family? Is there a wrong answer?
One thing I can say…I should probably go up the darn Eiffel Tower.
After all, I already acquired a Birkin ;
)