So how does a family afford to spend a year in Paris? you might be wondering by now. The rent for our two-bedroom apartment in the 8th arrondissement near the Champs Elysées is double what we pay for a large house in a leafy Vancouver neighbourhood. But everything is relative: we once saw a guy dole out 5 Euros for a bottle of Coke in a café while our wine was 3 Euros...
I do know a few people in Paris – mostly Canadian transplants like the fashion writer Clara, the Printemps womenswear buyer Yeny, and Corbin accessories designer Bridgitte. I hound them all for lunch dates like a desperate teenager. I’ve also been on a few girlie blind dates, set ups with friends of friends. These go remarkably well, and are an invaluable source of essential information such as cleanest yoga studios and fastest bikini waxers. But I’m still yearning for an authentic, Parisian-style dinner party. And then Murray gets the text: Saturday night, 8 p.m., apartment in the Marais! We start training the girls immediately to stay up late like French children...
Are you thinking The Bon Marché? Or maybe Printemps? Or the Hermès store on Rue de Sèvres that is housed in a former swimming pool?
You would be wrong. And while I am often found walking down Avenue de Montaigne lusting after the luxury goods at Dior and Chanel, I am just as often pushing a cart through my all-time favourite Paris store: Monoprix. They are everywhere in Paris, and when choosing our apartment I wasn’t oblivious to the fact that there was a large one two blocks away.
Now that we are getting into the psychology of actually living in Paris and not being here on vacation, I figured it was time for a French-style holiday. Every five weeks the kids get two weeks off school, and this was the Toussaints vacations (All Saints) the last two weeks of October. I booked us on a TGV (translation: fast train) to La Rochelle on the Atlantic Coast. From there we would cross the 3.5KM bridge to L’Ile de Ré, and island of 10 small towns connected by bike paths and known for its oysters, strawberries and sea salt...
After moving from AirBnb to AirBnb for over a month (12 suitcases shoved into 2 Uber Vans; 12 trips up and down Parisian micro-elevators) we are finally in our apartment. We learn this is actually quite quick. Over lunch with my friend Clara in the Canal St Martin where she lives, she tells me she and her husband had such a hard time renting an apartment....
A few days later, I head to the Grand Palais between the Tuileries gardens and the Champs Elysees, where Chanel always has their show. Next year, though, it will move to The Ritz Hotel nearby (which has just finished a major renovation) and was the legendary home of Coco Chanel for many years. I don’t have an invitation to today’s show, but like a lot of the people here, I’m interested in the spectacle of it all – people dressed to the nines in their double CCs– even dressing their dogs and their babies.
“I keep forgetting to tell you,” Murray says non-chalant-ly one night. “I saw Vincent Cassel (Black Swan, Mon Roi, Oceans 12 and 13) at pick up today. He jumped into a black car with his daughter.” Heart. Skips. Beat. We saw Mon Roi on the flight over and were crazy about it – I even posted it on my Facebook feed. I eagerly sign up for parent/teacher night...
Jet lag has its advantages: 6 a.m. jogs in the Parc Monceau as the sun comes up; endless dark hours to scour listings in search of that perfect Paris apartment. Of course I’ve been scoping listings on Paris version of Craig’s List, LeBonCoin, for months. And Seloger, and SabbaticalHomes, and Book a Flat, and One Fine Stay, and others. I quickly learn that three bedroom apartments are very rare because Parisian families keep them for themselves. “It took us a really long time to find an apartment,” Patricia, a friend of my cousin’s tells me on email...
Don’t get me wrong – we are not Paris neophites. Murray and I have been here together many times, and we’ve come as a family since Charlotte was 2. I worked here often in my 20s as a fashion buyer for Aritzia. We all speak French and have open minded palates. Still, after a 24-hour journey and transatlantic flight with children, sometimes it just doesn’t make sense to consult your Go Go Paris app for the newest, trendiest local bistro within 500 metres of where you are standing...
On August 29, we book into our Paris Airbnb with little drama – it’s a loft close to the Arche de Triomphe with just enough room for our eight suitcases, if you were willing to use them as bar stools. I chose the apartment for its location – equidistant from Emmanuelle’s Collège (she is entering Grade 6), and Charlotte’s Elementary for Grade 2. It’s on Boulevard Haussmann, which is the style of architecture this aristocratic area of northern Paris is known for...
Sub-letting our house in Vancouver’s leafy Shaugnessy neighbourhood was easy. With the vacancy rate officially at zero, we had brokers banging on our door and several families clamouring for it, most of whom were in the process of building houses or renovating in the area. In the end, though, we leased it to a plastic surgeon in her early 30s doing a residency in Vancouver. “Did you do a contra deal?” one of my best friends joked. Unfortunately, said surgeon specializes in hands. Why she wanted a three-bedroom home on a double lot was beyond us, but her mom paid the rent upfront and that was fine with us...
If you intend to stay in France for more than three months you need a long-stay travel Visa. That’s unless you have an EC passport, like my husband, who has Irish ancestry. Luck of the Irish indeed. The list of requirements for said Visa was as long as my arm – and I’m a long-limbed girl.
Because we travel to the States quite a bit, and were selling a property there, I needed to time the application perfectly, since they would need my passport for more than two weeks. You can’t apply until 6 weeks before your trip, and processing can take 10 business days...
