we are a "type"

i have never been really excited about the eiffel tower. it’s too cliche. but somehow, we have landed 5 mins from it. i jog by on my morning runs. i am softening to it though, since seeing it reminds me to appreciate this special place and time.

today was the school social get-together for the new families, that took place on the champs de mars – the park under the eiffel tower. j’s new school is a bilingual french/english school which has a special “adaptation” class for newly arrived non-french speaking or writing kids, who will spend a year getting their french up to speed. after that, they go into the mainstream curriculum. we were excited that we would be part of an international community again. her class has around 14 kids. there seem to be a few koreans, a few italians, and unfortunately quite a lot of english speakers from england, australia and the u.s. (p and i would be happier if there were fewer english speakers, as we worry that it will be too easy for j to just speak english all the time.) j got to meet her classmates and the parents got to meet each other.

i have to admit that at first, we were a little proud of our plan to move to paris. we felt brave and different. we were then shown up by j’s friend who announced that she and her family were moving to bangalore,india. they sold their house and cars and shipped all their belongings. we greatly admire them for it, but it made us feel like wimps! worse than that is that now that we are here, we find that, not only are we not brave, but we are not unique at all. we are a “type”. we’re so common that there is a word for what we are doing: “family sabbatical”. it seems that adam gopnick and his book “paris to the moon” about moving his family to paris, inspired and gave courage to many other american families to do the same. apparently the school is full of them. we walk around paris and hear LOTS of english and LOTS of bilingual little kids. then to add to our feelings of being non-unique, we find that one of the girls in j’s class is from the boston area, has played the violin for many years, AND has an asian mom. this may be confusing for the other families...

as usual, j will be our social link to the community. in san francisco, because she went to 2 different schools, music lessons and a plentitude of fancy specialty camps and afterschool activities, she was always recognizing kids around town. amazingly, at this school function, she recognized a younger kid with whom she had gone to camp this summer in boston. also, j’s assigned school buddy who had lived in sunnyvale, california for 4 years, and gone to the sunnyvale french school, knew a family from j’s violin school in s.f. another family we knew in s.f., who had gone to the s.f. french school with j, have just moved back to paris. i got an email from the mom saying that she saw us from the bus as j and i were wandering around town. then, saturday afternoon, we were across town and j greeted a kid on the metro, who she had met just that morning at the school get-together. all these encounters in the last few days and we’ve only been here a month. paris, our new small town! Print this post