When I was young, I used to have all these fantasies and idealizations of France as some paradise on earth, where people simply understood la joie de vivre (“the joy of living”) and lived life to their fullest. But as someone who is about to turn 39 and nearly entering her 40s, I have realized as an adult who is only getting older that there’s really no such thing as a perfect or ideal society, that every city, country, and place on earth has its tradeoffs. You cannot have one great thing without sacrificing another. The things I love about France can also be the things that frustrate me about it, in the same way that the things I love about the U.S. are also the things that make me absolutely detest it and want to run from it. But alas, that certainly does not mean I do not love France and look forward to every visit here. I feel very lucky to say that I have visited this beautiful and delicious country three times now. It’s one of just a handful of places on earth where I feel like I need to save extra luggage space for all the delicious things I want to bring back home with me (not to mention all the incredible French skincare finds that are so much cheaper here!).

We spent the last day in Paris unexpectedly given my unanticipated ER visit and a delayed arrival in Europe. I got to visit Paris’s Chinatown for the second time (the first time was for Chris’s cousin’s wedding back in October 2015), but this time, we actually got to explore it. We found Chris’s cousin’s ex favorite durian cake spot and got some durian flaky pastries to enjoy. I noticed how much more Vietnamese than Chinese the neighborhood was. Paris’s Chinatown doesn’t look at all like any other Chinatown I’ve been to in that 1) it’s not really that Chinese, and 2) it feels more like a suburban neighborhood where everyone gets around by foot, but the shops, stores, and restaurants don’t really live on a main street or drag. Rather, they are all spread out just within blocks of each other for you to stumble upon.

One interesting thing I learned while looking at how Asian foods, particularly breads or “bao” are labeled in France is that they basically call all bao (soft, fluffy milk bread/buns) “brioche.” When I think of “brioche,” I think of a very specific type of extremely soft, buttery French bread. But “brioche” in France, it seems, is used a lot more loosely. They use it to label all Chinese buns, likely because Chinese bao (good quality ones) are all light, fluffy, and soft in your mouth. This kind of tickled me and gave me some more insight into the French language. My grasp of French is pretty poor now, but it has been coming back to me being surrounded by it here for the last day, and I’ve started remembering basic phrases and have been able to understand what people are saying to each other based on context. But I do love learning nuances of linguistics, especially of Chinese and French because they are the two languages I have formally studied.