Today, I was really craving Pinkberry, which, as you can probably guess, doesn’t exist in France. We do, however, have a curious knockoff called Myberry. There’s one not too far from my house, and I was considering trying it out, so in a moment of boredom I logged onto the Myberry website. At first glance, looks [...]

A strike by air traffic controllers is expected to last until the end of this week. But it is only affecting flights from France to other European countries. If you are scheduled to fly to or from France and the U.S. or other non-European countries, you should be OK.

I once met a flight attendant who amazed me by recounting how she slept easily on her Boston-Asia routes, in between attending to customers.  When she arrived at her destination, she said, she usually spent the day shopping or sightseeing. Part of me didn’t believe her and part of me wanted to strangle her.
I have [...]

It has been…maybe a month or more since I opened my French bank account. It took about a week to set it all up, but the tricky part has been getting my debit card. I STILL do not have it. I have been stopping by the bank once or twice a week now to check [...]

Recently I participated in a panel discussion at the British Ambassador’s home in Paris called Writers at the Residence to help raise money for the SOS Help Line. For those of you unfamiliar with SOS Help, it’s a confidential English-language listening line in France founded in 1974 by a group of American and British health professionals. It is [...]

 
I’m back in France after the longest time spent in England since I left twenty five years ago. My two and a half months in the motherland has left me dazed and confused and as far as this blog is concerned, mute for weeks on end. In writing about my understanding of France, I have [...]

Yesterday when I got home from work I checked my mailbox as I normally do. Because I love getting mail I was excited to see several letters waiting for me in my mailbox. One piece of mail that caught my eye was wrapped in a blue plastic wrapping with the emblem of the Republic Francaise [...]

 
When you are an American living in France, getting sick has a silver lining.  That silver lining is: you’re in France!  You’re in France, the country that the World Health Organization rates the top on Earth for quality of health care and affordability. You’re in France, where you know that, whatever you have, you will [...]

 
I had some sharp stomach pains early in the morning on Tuesday that wouldn’t subside, so I decided I needed to go to the emergency room. So I took a taxi to the closest hospital, the Hotel Dieu on the Ile de la Cite. The emergency room was eerily quiet with only two people in the waiting room. [...]

I bawled my eyes out on the plane ride back from New York this time around. Alone in the dark at 3AM. For exactly 76 minutes. I thought about my family and cried. I thought about my friends and cried. I thought about all the stoops in Brooklyn and Queens I sat on and cried. [...]