Winter travels part 1: Thanksgiving, USA.

We've travelled a fair bit this winter, but we've hardly blogged at all! Sorry to keep you waiting. This post is the first in a series!

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a big American holiday in late November, where you get together with family, eat a lot of food, and be thankful. It's basically a harvest festival.

For Talia's family, this is a big celebration, so we made a special effort to traverse the 9 time zones from Europe to Oregon. Since it's such a long trip, we spent two weeks there.

The Oregon coastline.

Marilyn, me, Maëlys, and Talia, keeping warm on the beach.

The big event, of course, was thanksgiving day. There were 21 of us in total - me, Talia, and Maëlys; Talia's three brothers and three sisters-in-law, and their children (three boys and two girls); one of Talia's cousins and her husband; another of Talia's cousins and her two children; and Talia's parents. Eight children, ranging from 4 months to 11 years, and thirteen grown-ups. What a party!

Maëlys's cousins learn how to spell her name.

Marilyn's famous dinner rolls!

Lemon meringue pie!

More pies, and a turkey.

Everyone assembled before the eating began! Not pictured: me.

Of course, for everyone except Talia's parents, it was their first time meeting Maëlys. (And she'd grown a lot since Talia's parents saw her last!) So there was lots of baby-holding and cooing.

Maëlys with Grandpa and Erik.

Maëlys with Hanna.

Maëlys with Mayela. (Note her thanksgiving-themed dress!)

Aunt Ashley reads a story to Travis, Maëlys, Sage, and Erik.

As a bonus, here's a picture of Hanna reading her parents the Scots translation of The Gruffalo, and explaining what words like "biled" and "ahint" mean.

Click to zoom in!

A lot of food was eaten, as is traditional, and it was fantastic to see everyone and have them meet Maëlys and compare baby stories. A refreshing trip to the new world!

Next up: Milan!

Visitors, Trips, Birthing Classes, and Immigration Woes

We are rather falling behind in our writing of blog posts. Sorry, dear readers! As the end of my pregnancy draws nearer, it seems there are a plethora of tasks as well as hours of research begging to be done. But we will do our best to keep up with the updates. Here are some of the things we've been busy with recently.

First of all, last weekend we had a lovely quick visit with Micah, another dear friend from Columbus. Micah happens to be the younger brother of Soraya, who we saw in London in April. Just four more people to go and we will have been visited by their whole family! Micah, who is studying history at Ohio State University, was part of a school tour of European historical sites. He visited Ireland, England, France, Poland, and Germany, and we were lucky to get to take him out to dinner before he left Paris. We sampled the delicious, if not-so-French, cuisine of Loulou's Friendly Diner (excellent burgers and gluten free buns too!), walked around the Saint Germain des Prés area of Paris (the Middle Ages Museum is cool--it features a Roman-era bathhouse), and walked up to the Panthéon, the huge domed secular mausoleum where notable French citizens are buried. Then naturally we found a fancy chocolaterie, Maison Georges Larnicol, where we oohed and ahhed and Micah bought some treats to take back with him. It's always wonderful to see friends from our old home!

Micah came to visit!

We also spent about 16 hours that same weekend taking a childbirthing and newborn care class that was put on by and for the English-speaking members of Message, a group for anglophone parents in Paris. I will write a post soon with more information about Message, as it's been a lifesaver for us in navigating pregnancy in France. But for now, I'll say that the birthing class was excellent! It was attended by five couples from American, English, Scottish, French, and German backgrounds, and was taught by a lovely and knowledgable English lady who received training from the UK's National Childbirth Trust. It was a great opportunity to meet others in the same boat as us, trying to navigate the confusing waters of grossesse en France. We learned a lot, shared our experiences, hopes, and fears, and made some friends and supporters in the process.

Last week, Rory was finally able to make his re-scheduled trip to the Netherlands. He had been invited to give a presentation at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen back in March, but with the Brussels terrorist attacks happening the day he was meant to leave, his train was cancelled. This time he made it to the Netherlands without incident and enjoyed presenting his research to a group of linguists. Afterwards, he spent a few hours wandering around Amsterdam, being impressed by the half-moon-shaped belts of canals and the huge number of bicycles on the streets.

Canals of Amsterdam

On a less exciting note, I had my long-awaited convocation at the police prefecture for my carte de séjour (my French residence permit). I'd waited for this since my last appointment in January, and at this appointment I should have, in theory, been given the green light to actually receive the real permit in about a month or so. However, we moved to a new flat in a département (an administrative district in France; bigger than a county but smaller than a state) outside of Paris in the intervening months. Since cartes de séjour are handled by each département separately, the best they could do for us was to renew my récépissé for a month (a receipt which allows me to live in France for a couple of months at a time), and tell me to make an appointment at the prefecture in my new département. I suspect the process (ongoing for the last 7 months) will have to be started again almost from scratch at the new place, so I'm not overjoyed about this development. C'est la vie française. 

More soon to come! Have a great week, everyone!

An Abundance of Free Time

Before we moved to France, whenever we told someone that we would be moving to Paris for Rory's work, I was inevitably asked the question, “So what are you going to do there?” I would usually smile sheepishly and say, “I have no idea!” and then elaborate on what I might do with all my free time (since I can't legally work until I have my residence permit, which may be several months). Anyone who knows me probably knows that free time was a foreign concept to me. Rory had to persuade me not to teach cello lessons on the weekends or after 7 pm, and any time that wasn't spent teaching was usually spent on Baha'i activities like serving on the Local Spiritual Assembly and participating in neighborhood community building. It's not that I didn't want free time, it's just that there were too many good causes to support.


To be honest, having nothing but free time in a new city and country is a somewhat terrifying prospect. To not have the consistency of getting out of the apartment every day, and to not have specific projects for which I am held accountable, means that there are some days when I stand on our balcony and gaze out at the bustling street below, and then decide to spend the rest of the day at home. As I wrote three and a half weeks ago when Rory first started his job,


“Being unfamiliar with my surroundings, the timid, small town girl in me would have been completely content to stay at the apartment doing laundry and watching episodes of “Jane the Virgin” until Rory returned. Paris is an amazing city, don't get me wrong, but the throngs of people all saying things I can't understand, the irrepressible fear that someone will steal my purse...these things make it scary to tackle the city on my own.”


On that day three and a half weeks ago, I'm proud to say that I was writing those thoughts not in our apartment but in a gluten-free cafe called My Free Kitchen. I steeled my resolve and trekked to this cute cafe where I deliberately ate very slowly, not just to make the delicious blueberry almond cake last longer, but also to give my nerves a chance to calm down. It was a relatively easy walk, only 30 minutes and almost a straight shot from our place, but I was nervous nonetheless. No one messed with me, no one even talked to me, it was all fine, but I couldn't shake the nervousness.

GF blueberry cake from My Free Kitchen on my first solo outing

Fortunately, that successful first solo outing gave me the courage to explore other new places in the city by myself. I have visited several of the surprisingly numerous gluten-free cafes, I've gone to the bank and the post office and the town hall to conduct important business (speaking in French, I might add!), I even went for an early morning run to see new parts of my neighborhood.

Hôtel de Ville, Paris' City Hall

A large part of the rest of my time has been spent working on learning French, cooking and baking in our tiny kitchen, reading and writing (Harry Potter in French is a fun way to learn new words), meeting friends-of-friends, and finding groups to join on Meetup. This week I went to a meeting of the Trailing Spouses group at a coffee shop next to the river Seine and found a bunch of lovely American, British, and Australian women to chat with. Just before that, I registered for a French conversation group at the Cercle International de l'ARC (I had an interview in French! It was terrifying!).

Harry Potter at the Wizard School

Hogwarts is called Collège Poudlard. *Giggle*

All this is to say that I am finding fun and productive ways to use my free time. Without the extreme demands on my time and energy, I am finding that I can be more creative and more open to new experiences. I am standing at a crossroads, with paths branching off in all different directions, and I get to choose which paths to follow. It's an exciting prospect.

Settling in

If you've been following our blog, you'll know that we've been to Scotland and Belgium and even Canada and Iceland briefly, but we haven't really mentioned Paris yet. We've been here for nearly two weeks now, if you can believe it, so I should probably share with you some of our progress in settling in and making Paris our home.

La fontaine Médicis, in the Jardin du Luxembourg.

One aspect of settling in somewhere is having access to the things that you are used to having (or, alternatively, being used to having the things that you have access to). This can often be difficult when moving to another country, where things are done differently, and a degree of flexibility is usually required. One such item we were particularly concerned about was the availability of gluten-free flours. Talia is gluten intolerant, and loves to bake, and gluten-free baking requires a diversity of flours, starches, and gums of various origins. In Columbus, these often sold for fairly high prices at "natural" stores.

Imagine our surprise, then, when the first store we walk into - an African corner shop no bigger than a newsagents - has a huge variety of flours, both glutenful and gluten-free, for prices far lower than we could get in the US! These flours were marketed not as "natural" alternatives to support a healthy lifestyle, but simply traditional west African fare. We have since discovered even more stores with great variety of ingredients.

On the other hand, however, we have had great difficulty in finding baked beans, of either the American or British variety. (For those who don't know the difference - baked beans in America tend to be a bit more sugary, and come with pieces of bacon(!) in them, while British baked beans are in a more modest tomato sauce.) Apparently the French just don't eat beans in this way, and we had no luck in sourcing them in the "international" section of a local supermarket. There are some "English food shops", which import food specially from Britain (everything from pickled chutney to spotted dick), although we haven't checked them out. It will be hard, but I am sure that I can resign myself to a life without baked beans.

In addition to getting to grips with the food situation, I'm finding that I keep having to remind myself that, no, we're not on holiday, we really do live here. I suppose this is a common feeling when moving to a new place, but it's especially acute in a major tourist destination like Paris. Settling in will take a while, I think.