Athalie in Paris

Bingeing Season 1 of Emily in Paris gave me all the feels.

Not just because it has been almost a year since I have been on a plane to anywhere, but because Paris has always felt like MY city to the extent that someone can own a place. I know you want to fight me on this. And you should. Could claiming Paris as my own be any more contrived? Don’t all writers love and long to live in Paris? Is there even a shred of originality in my love affair with this city? And not to mention the mound of complication when I consider my Haitian heritage and all that the French owe us. No one ever talks about who built the famed monuments or what cruel slavery based enterprises funded the whole thing. But, spoiler alert: the story is not nearly as sweet as all of the sugar pumped out of the French colony of Saint Dominigue (now Haiti).

But I digress. Paris was my first big adventure as a kid. The summer I turned 7, my mother and I flew to Paris to visit my cousin Carole and her family in the city for 3 weeks, traveling to cities by TGV on the weekends: Brussels, Cannes, Rome, Venice. It was a lot, and gave me just the right summer highlights to talk about at the new, mostly white private school I was attending in the fall. For this and many other reasons, my mother is a genius.

Fast forward about seven years at the same private school and I would be headed off to Paris again but this time with a group of my classmates. We had taken plenty of overnight bus trips but this was my first time on a plane with friends. Aside from nights with our host families, the next two weeks were spent with my classmates checking off every academic to do list in the city: the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe, Jardin de Luxembourg, Musée D’Orsay, Versailles - even a daylong trip to Mont St. Michel. It was late November - a first Thanksgiving spent away from home for many - and while our teachers had been drilling us on the Parisian subway since school had started in September so we could move through the city with ease, we were not prepared for the biting cold. Like check on your elderly neighbors cold that we later learned had broken a centuries’ old record.

So we took to the narrow streets of Paris, all 16 of us puffed to the max in multiple winter layers creating “bottlenecks” at every turn as our chaperones took to shouting at us. Group travel had its obvious set backs like when one of our group purchased a massive American flag to wave from every monument and drape over every statue, but it was marvelous to be on my own in such a great city and to do this as a teenager made it much easier for me to return.

In a fortunate twist of plans, I would return to Paris a month later this time with my mother and my niece to visit my cousin Carole again. Carole had been living for almost 20 years in Paris at this point and often felt isolated especially around the holidays. So my mom found us some favorable fares to Paris on Tower Air to ring in the New Year with Carole, her husband and children. Never heard of Tower Air? It’s probably for the best. I won’t trash it too much because it was the only way were able to afford to make it to Paris during the holidays, never mind it being so close to that school trip that we had just paid for. But what I will say is that this airline left in the middle of the night from the cargo section of JFK so it wasn’t so much a “good deal” as it was a “fair trade.” And most importantly is that we made it - there and back with a lot of eclairs in between. It was also on this trip that I discovered the French art of the reveillon - an all night dinner party on the eve of a holiday. In this case, New Year’s Eve. Specifically the one before the one before the millennium so the big countdown clock was already on the Eiffel Tower, it just wan’t the biggest deal because we still had a whole year to go to Y2K. It was however a big enough deal to me that I still carry on the tradition of the New Year’s Eve reveillon to this day in my own home.

I’m not really sure how we managed to pull this off but by the time the new millennium came, my friend Jane and I convinced our parents to let us travel to Paris for spring break our senior year of high school. Jane had missed the original school trip a couple of years prior and somewhere in the middle of watching Moulin Rouge together we decided that she had to go and that I should be her guide. Our parents were surprisingly fine with letting two 17 year old girls go to Paris alone, mostly because we would be staying with my cousin Carole, but what they didn’t know (and neither did we at the time) was that my cousin would not keep an eye on us at all. In fact it was at her suggestion that we stayed out past the last train home with plans to party until the first train began again at sunrise. She would not have anticipated that our club selections would lead us accidentally to the red light district frantically counting enough Francs home for a taxi in place of waiting for the morning train. Yikes! But also the stuff of bonding… this story was perfect to tell as Jane’s maid of honor years later - the moral of the story being that after you get stuck in Pigalle after hours as a young girl, everything else in life seems pretty easy to handle.

Which brings me back to Emily in Paris. A 20-something year old embarks on the work trip of her life to Paris and hijinks ensue… Oh wait, did I say Emily? I meant me still… As a Brooklyn girl, going to college in California already felt like being abroad, so I never really thought about taking a semester abroad or even a summer backpack trip. Time away from school was always for going back home to New York. But then a few years into working at a startup level Facebook, word dropped that the sales team was expanding to Paris. It would be hard to to manage, and the bureaucratic hoops were plenty, but I was determined to be the representative from Palo Alto who went to help launch the Paris office. In my dreams - and in our original plans - this would have been a year-long assignment. But 2008 happened and every budget in the company was cut and so I made do with a 5 week run. Not the life altering time abroad I was hoping for, but still the longest time I had ever visited. It was a lot of time in the office without time for much else - a wakeup call from dreams of Paris indeed, but the walk from my extended stay hotel had a view of the Eiffel Tower the whole time so it was not without sparks of touristic bliss.

Facebook was in the process of opening a few offices around Europe with large operations in Dublin and London, so there happened to be a few of us Palo Alto expats around Europe making the most of our time out of the office. There was a weekend in London, a weekend in Amsterdam and the balance of weekends with visitors in Paris. Like Emily almost every encounter could merit its own episode though without all of the sexy bedroom scenes (unless watching me struggle with jetlag for weeks counts).

There would be the episode where the Facebook crew got driven around London in a black cab for an hour while trying to find someone’s house before ultimately giving up. Or the episode where Marina and I invented Galentine’s day with a traffic stopping influencer-style photo shoot on a rainy Sunday night in Paris after everything had closed. Then there’s the heartwarming one where the French pharmacist helped me through a fever (why don’t we have that here in America?), the all-night club night on Valentine’s Day with a Parisian friend I met transferring planes in Denver Airport a few years prior, and the season finale where I made friends with a group of rowdy French business men after finally mustering up the courage to go out to a bar alone. There would be montages of me putting on a dress and heels every day for work (not the uniform at FB headquarters), ordering pain au chocolate every morning before crossing Avenue Klever to Rue de L’Amiral Hamelin to work, and so many shots of me stuffing my face with macarons from Carette while watching the Eiffel Tower’s hourly light show from Place de Trocadero steps from my apartment. It was a time.

I have been back to Paris many times since. I have swapped apartments, created fictitious writing retreats for myself and have even gone back with Jane as an adult where we had a memorable experience fighting an unknown animal stuck in the chimney of our rental flat. In recent years, I have enjoyed visiting Paris for a few days at a time with my husband Adnan on our way to or from visiting his family in Turkey (more stories for another time). I am always happy to return, but a few days never feels enough to wander the streets and take in the city the same way that I used to. We do different things now, Michelin meals, wine bars and the occasional dip into the shiny stores that I only dreamed of as a scrappy teen counting change for a ride home. Adnan is not one for taking public transportation so all of those navigation lessons from my school trip have faded to the back of mind. But regardless of the fact that I don’t know which train lines will get me from Le Marais to the 16ème the fastest, I still feel a certain ownership of this city. Like a first love who may or may not have gone on to marry someone else. Emily may find herself the center of attention in Paris, but it will always feel like my city.