F Train to Paris

In which a Jewish family from Brooklyn moves to Paris, France for two years of work, school, and adventures.

 

Wish me mazal tov--my blog is one year old today. And I'll probably be wrapping it up pretty soon, as we are no longer living in Paris, though I still hope to write about our summer travels and talk a bit more about our experiences during the past two years.

The kids are back in school--so far, so good--and I start a full-time job on Monday. After two years of coffee, museums, and long walks, that will be a big change, but I'm looking forward to it.  Ralph is not loving the commute to New Jersey, but he's surviving. And we are all gratified by the very warm welcome we've received from our old friends and neighbors here in Brooklyn.

During our first couple of weeks back home, two spiders took up residence in front of our house: a large one whose web stretched from pine tree to a very tall lily stem, and a smaller one that wove its web between two trash cans. I enjoyed watching these two reweave their webs every day, one by day and the other by night, as I rewove the fabric of our home and our lives. Putting the puzzle of our household back together--packing stacks of books into bookcases, clothes into drawers and closets, kitchen utensils into cupboards--often with great frustration and always dripping with sweat, I took great pleasure in stepping outside the house to admire the work of these tireless, unflappable workers. Both have departed, just as our house began to feel like home again.

posted by: pariskleinmans at 16:18 | link | comments (4) |

Today is apparently Blog Day, so I'm blogging. Someday soon I will sit down in front of a computer in a comfortable chair and write about our travels around France this summer, but for now I'm siting on the floor with a laptop in my lap, a position that's not really conducive to writing lengthy posts.

I'm supposed to include links to five blogs "with a focus on diversity and bridging cultures," according to Global Voices Online. So I'd like to draw your attention to a few of my links (they're over there on the left). Aimless, of  The Aimless Files, has recently begun blogging again after being offline for months. I can't wait to catch up with her blog about Jewish parenting in California. Then there's Balabusta at Sabbath Meals, who blogs from (I think) Boston, also about Jewish parenting with an emphasis on the vegetarian meals she cooks for family and friends on Shabbat--and, lately, about penguins. A good friend in Paris blogs about parenting and about her obsession (sorry, Karen) with teaching her daughter to read, at This Blog. One of my all-time faves, although he doesn't call it a blog, is Dan Gordis's essays about life in Israel and--you guessed it--parenting. Finally, a blog that's about neither Jews nor parenting: L'Amerloque, the guru of Franco-American cultural differences, developed a following via his comments on other blogs, and finally started his own last spring.

Enjoy these bloggers, and come back here in a couple of weeks. By then I hope to have set up my desktop computer (and my desk) so I can tell you all about our travels and our rentree to Brooklyn.

posted by: pariskleinmans at 02:12 | link | comments (1) |