Four years ago today, I stopped living in France for a short while
We all know that I used to live in France for a short while. Like anyone who lived in Europe for a little bit, I love to talk about it. I started mentioning that I lived in France for a short while as soon as I moved back home because I had dreams about starting my life once I got back that inevitably got crushed. There’s really nothing else exciting or interesting to talk about except for your seven months abroad when you’re once again living in a suburban town with nothing much to do except go to a very boring job Monday through Friday.
Life living in France for a bit wasn’t as glamorous as you might think. For one, I didn’t live in actual Paris, but a suburb that was pretty far out of the way. For the cheap price of thirteen euros a month (at that point I was really wondering why I was being charged at all), I lived in an apartment at my school in a town called Arpajon. Across the school was a cornfield. Being from a suburb that also served as the last stop between corn and people, it really felt like home. On Sundays all the restaurants were closed except for the Burger King on the side of a highway, so I’d frequently walk through said cornfield to get my fast food fix. This was the height of a fancy European lifestyle.
I feel like I talk about living in France for a short while so much because it was the one time in my life I’ve ever been able to experience something besides the grind of capitalism. I worked at a school, and while students were learning five days a week, teachers only worked four. We had two weeks of vacation for every six weeks of working (which, like, other workers definitely don’t get but everyone gets a tight five weeks off a year at least). I had health insurance but even when that didn’t kick in I only spent 25 euros on a doctor’s visit. Obviously, I didn’t have a car and until the train strikes of March and April started, I really didn’t have a problem getting around much.
And then just like that, my contract expired and I felt like I wanted to go home. Moving to France was never the end game for me, and I didn’t find any romance, let alone a romance strong enough to make me want to uproot my life entirely. I always wanted to live in Chicago and tell jokes to strangers, so I went back home to do exactly that. And then, of course, I didn’t do that for a really long time. Finding a job was harder than I thought, and getting paid enough to afford to move out of my parents’ house was downright impossible—even with a new resume booster with experience working at a school in France of all places! When one of my old French coworkers reached out to me in an email asking me what was going on, she must have found my new life back home so wretched and boring because she never emailed me back after that. So it goes.
Obviously bad things don’t last forever and I finally managed to move out and do jokes and make new friends. I now have interesting stories to tell that happen in the continental United States. Sometimes I do mention living in France for a short while and my friends audibly groan—they hate when I talk about it! (It’s like, get a personality or something! And I respect that.) I’ve been reading more books recently but I can’t bring myself to big brain it and read a book in French (I would need so much time and a big-ass dictionary to help me through it at this point). And after three years of barely taking a day off of work, I managed to kill my bank account by going on two trips just this year.
It’s been four years since I stopped living in France for a short while, so I definitely need to get over it. Living abroad can only be interesting for so long, as they say! (Nobody says this but I did right now). I’ll just be walking around six miles a day here now. It’s basically the same thing.