ParisDiscovered™
The café owner doesn’t ask what I want anymore. She just starts making it.
It took years to cross that invisible line—from client to habitué. To receive a nod instead of the formal “Bonjour, monsieur” reserved for strangers. To navigate markets by instinct, knowing which vendor has the better tomatoes and where to find bread worth walking an extra block for.
I live on the right bank now with my husband Roberto. I know what “revenez demain” actually means (go away), and how to apologize in a way that makes French bureaucrats slightly less hostile.
I learned all of it the hard way.
I first saw Paris at sixteen. Made a promise to myself on the Pont Neuf, the way every romantic teenager does: I’ll live here someday.
Then I went home and spent the next thirty years not doing anything about it. Career instead. Nine cities in five states. By every external measure, successful. By internal measure, increasingly aware that “someday” was a lie.
In 2012, a friend finally said what needed to be said: “Why don’t you just shut up and do it?”
So in 2013, at forty-five, I quit my job, sold everything that wouldn’t fit in two suitcases, and bought a one-way ticket.
The first year was brutal.
Everything that had made me competent in America—none of it applied. I showed up to appointments without the right paperwork. I spent entire days accomplishing one task that would have taken ten minutes back home.
There was the afternoon I told a gardienne that her building smelled like cheese when I meant to compliment the flowers. (The verb sentir is treacherous.) There was the apartment scam I almost fell for. The bureaucratic maze I entered confidently and exited humiliated.
But here’s what those disasters taught me: the French respect people who try, even badly. The mistakes are how you earn your place here.
I didn’t come to Paris with a plan. I came with a willingness to say yes to whatever appeared.
I fell into property management—helping one friend rent their apartment, then managing hundreds across the city. I became a certified tour director. I worked as a relocation consultant, helping Americans navigate the bureaucracy I’d barely survived myself.
I learned which landlords were trustworthy and which were predatory. Which shortcuts actually functioned and which were traps.
I never stopped teaching music—piano students aged five to seventy, a gay men’s choir. In 2020, Expatriates Magazine named me Best Music Teacher in Paris. A strange full-circle for a kid who started on a two-octave Sears keyboard in a mobile home in Indiana.
Moving to Paris wasn’t just relocation. It was reinvention.
Everything I learned over thirteen years—the workarounds, the unwritten rules, the actual process of how things work here—I’ve put into this course.
Because I remember what it felt like to have no idea what I was doing. To feel stupid and lost and completely alone. To wish that someone who’d been through it would just tell me how it actually worked.
I didn’t have a guide when I moved. I didn’t have anyone to call when I was standing in a government office with the wrong photocopy, or when the apartment listing turned out to be a scam, or when I accidentally insulted someone’s building and couldn’t figure out why they were angry.
I want to be the friend in Paris you don’t have yet.
Not a guru. Not an expert dispensing wisdom from above. Just someone who made the leap over a dozen years ago and learned, through considerable trial and error, how this place actually works. Someone who’ll tell you what’s hard, what’s easy, and what nobody warns you about.
ParisDiscovered isn’t a list of tips. It’s the comprehensive guide I wish I’d had—covering everything from visas and banking to finding an apartment to navigating French bureaucracy to actually enjoying the city once you arrive.
I’ll be direct with you throughout. If something is difficult, I’ll tell you it’s difficult. If there’s a shortcut, I’ll share it. If the French way of doing something makes no sense to American logic, I’ll acknowledge that—but I’ll also help you work within the system rather than fight it.
Fighting the system never works. Trust me.
I can’t guarantee Paris will love you back immediately. It won’t. This city earns its reputation for being difficult. But I can promise you this: Paris can become home. Not easily. Not instantly. But genuinely.
The café where the owner knows my order. The markets I navigate by instinct. The sense of having finally become who I was supposed to be.
That’s what reinvention looks like. I found mine here. You might find yours too.
Ready to stop dreaming and start planning?