Moving to Paris

When I was 15 years old I participated in a short school exchange program to France during my summer school holidays. I went to school for a month in Lyon, went on a field excursion to the United Nations in Geneva, and spent a week in Paris with other participants in the program. It snowed on Christmas Eve night as I drove with my host family to their family celebration. I vividly remember seeing the Eiffel Tower for the first time, and eating an ice-cream cone while walking the streets of Paris on a cold mid-winter evening. The Christmas lights were still on display and I knew in the depths of my soul that I would one day live in Paris.

I had just completed year 10 and had been learning French throughout high school. I loved the French language and was obsessed with all things French culture. It was some of the best weeks of my life - not merely because I was living a bucket list dream - but also because I was experiencing a sort of coming of age moment. I returned to Australia with a determination to become fluent in French and to one day live in Europe and work at the United Nations.

I studied French, and extension French for my HSC. My written and reading skills were always quite sound but I always struggled with oral comprehension, and I was always self-editing when I spoke, constantly afraid to make mistakes and therefore rarely speaking unless I had all of the right words to say. As any language learner will know, that is a sure way to never progress.

But I received good marks for my HSC exams and during my gap year, I made the decision to study law and international studies. I was working towards my dream to be fluent in French and live and work in Europe. At some point during these years I also decided that I would learn some of the other official languages of the UN. I arrived at University, enrolled in law and international studies, including classes in French and Spanish as part of my international studies degree. I had no intention to become a lawyer but I knew that a law degree, paired with international studies, would set me up well for international work.

Fast forward five long and boring, and frequently miserable, years of study and I had my degrees. I had studied French and Spanish for the first three years, but only law subjects in the last two years. During those five years at Uni, I worked nearly full time at McDonald’s and, of course, met Dylan.

And somewhere along the way, my goals and plans changed. Perhaps not intentionally, but they did nonetheless. The sensible first step in an international career would be to join a graduate program in an Australian Government department in Canberra (as one of my close Uni friends did). But I didn’t. I stayed in Sydney and got an internship, and then later a graduate legal job at Transgrid, setting my career on a different trajectory; as an energy lawyer. Certainly, a large part of the shift was the desire to remain in Sydney, since I had met Dylan and that’s where he was going to University. But that’s certainly not the full explanation. Some part of me had lost the motivation to pursue an international, bilingual career in Europe. Honestly, I suspect a large part of that was fear of failure and fear of the unknown. It’s a notoriously unclear and competitive career path. I chose the safer, clearer option that was, somewhat, conveniently put before me. It also didn’t help that I had ceased all language learning after the end of my third year of University.

And so, over the next fifteen years, I made a career as an English speaking lawyer in Australia, specialising in energy regulation and policy. It’s a niche area but my skills have been in high demand and ultimately, it’s a speciality I’ve really enjoyed. But some small part of me always grieved the loss of that little dream I had to live and work in Europe and to become fluent in French.

When each new year rolled around and I reflected on the year past and the year to come, there were many years where the regret I identified was not learning French. Every now and then I would enrol in an online course with Alliance Francaise or re-subscribe to a language learning app. But despite a few visits to Paris and France in the intervening years, and an ongoing love affair with French, none of it ever really stuck and it was hard to maintain motivation to learn a language I wasn’t using and had no foreseeable need for (other than the infrequent visits and the simple joy of learning another language).

But fate intervened, and twenty-one years later, almost to the day I first saw the Eiffel Tower, I’ve moved to Paris.

Once more in the middle of the northern hemisphere winter, I found myself wandering the streets of Paris. But I was no longer a 15 year old girl with a dream, but a 36 year old woman facing the somewhat anticlimactic reality of relocating one’s previously comfortable life to another country.

And in a rather ironic twist of fate, it was Dylan who brought us here. Not me. Dylan, who had never learnt a word of French, obtained a job in a French tech company, which facilitated this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And so, I couldn’t really hold it against him for keeping me in Sydney in my early twenties. Once more, it was Dylan’s professional life that became the catalyst for opening the door to a new life experience for us.

It’s probably the wildest thing we’ve ever done, even more so than the year of travel, which never felt like much of a risk at all, and definitely more so than moving to Tasmania, which was always a short flight from Sydney. Dylan applied for the job on a whim, after 8 years at his previous company, and only when pressed about his commitment to the idea did we have to seriously decide whether to proceed with the interview process. We did, and here we are, now living in Paris.

At the end of 2025, we packed up our life in Tasmania, which we’d only just settled into, and then drove up to Sydney and did the same in Penrith. We rented out both houses. We sold some stuff, gave away some stuff, and put into storage what we couldn’t or wouldn’t sell. There was also a skip bin’s worth of stuff from each house that didn’t get re-homed or stored. It is truly incredible what one can accumulate throughout life.

And now, we’re staying in a 45m2 Airbnb apartment in the centre of Paris searching for our new home and determinedly not purchasing anything that is not strictly necessary.

We’ve been in Paris for two months now, since mid-January. Dylan is settling into work. I am looking for jobs and doing intensive French classes in the meantime. We are navigating the endlessly infuriating bureaucracy of the French Government and social service systems. We’ve got bank accounts and Dylan’s earning Euros. We are making and attending doctors appointments. We are exploring the arrondissements. We signed up to a gym and will have to find another when we move into our own apartment. We have eaten at some great restaurants and some mediocre ones.

I am constantly on the search for the best pastries (no conclusion yet) and fear that the best croissant I’ve ever had remains at SKB, which is unmistakably not in France, but in my favourite little corner of the world.

We lament the dog shit-covered streets but relish the constant supply of freshly baked baguettes. We’ve had a dose of the winter flu. It was pitch black until 9.00am when we arrived but the sun is appearing earlier and earlier each day.

We’re acquainting ourselves with cultural idiosyncrasies and the inexplicable complexities of apartment renting in Paris. We walk a lot, but also appreciate the efficiency of the metro (until there is a “grève” of course). I’m eating way too much crème brûlée and love that there is always champagne on the menu.

That is, we are discovering Parisienne life, little by little, challenge by challenge, joy by joy. We’re also planning little weekend trips all around France as well, with a goal in mind to visit all 13 regions of metropolitan France (“L’Hexagone”) and to thoroughly acquaint ourselves with every corner of the country before we move back to Australia.

Our temporary visa expires in one month and we continue to wait for our resident’s permit. We’ve already left the country twice; once to Luxembourg for a weekend getaway, and once to Italy to go snowboarding. We won’t be able to leave Schengen once our temporary visa expires in April if we do not have our resident’s permit, and so we just planned a trip to London for the weekend before our visa expires.

So life is a blend of the mundane administrative tasks necessary for emigration and the little pleasures that can be found when living in a European city where the rest of the world is at your doorstep.

And after 8 weeks, we have just signed a lease on an apartment. We have found our new home and are eager to move in. Finally finding a place to live has taken a weight off our shoulders and we feel as though we can finally start living.

But perhaps for me the most gratifying outcome of all of this so far is the return to that childhood dream of becoming fluent in French. I am no longer that little girl who is afraid to speak with mistakes and I’m relishing the rapid expansion of my vocabulary through both formal study and my lived experience. So despite it still feeling like an insurmountable challenge, I feel, for the first time in my life, that I may actually be able to do it. And I can’t wait to find out.