F Train to Paris

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

 

We did it--we survived the three-day marathon of Sukkot and Shabbat, and there are even a few scraps of food left in the house. Next week, we get to do it all over again!

This is the hardest time of year to be living away from our real home. We all miss our Brooklyn friends, and wish we could be spending the holidays with them. However, we did have a nice time today with some new friends, who we met at our Paris synagogue and who came over for lunch. We belong to the only Conservative synagogue in Paris. Most of the synagogues here (about 100, I think) are Orthodox, and there are a handful that are affiliated with the Liberal movement, which fits in somewhere between Reform and Conservative. But we feel most comfortable at Adath Shalom, which is the closest thing we can find to our home shul in Brooklyn, Kane Street Synagogue in Cobble Hill. It's about a 20-minute walk from our apartment, which means that when the weather is bad, or we're tired, or we come up with some other lame excuse, we don't actually go. Last year we went regularly in the fall, dropped off sharply when the weather got cold, and never got back in the habit in the spring. This year, we keep telling ourselves that the walk isn't so bad, and that we'll make more of an effort. But real effort required to become integrated, to get to know people, and since we're spending just one more year here, is it worth the effort?

This week promises to be insanely busy for me, between the incessant coffee mornings sponsored by the parents' associations of the boys' two schools, other PTA-related activities, and the final round of holiday shopping before Shemini Atzeret begins next Wednesday night. Last Wednesday I spent the entire day food shopping (actually, I did briefly attend a coffee morning first), filling my oh-so-Parisian shopping cart three times on three separate trips: first with vegetables, fish, and cheese from the weekly market on av. President Wilson, then with groceries at the supermarket; and finally with fruit and bread from the shops on our local market street, the rue de l'Annonciation. (The high point of the day ocurred when I arrived at the supermarket checkout with my full wagon, only to find that the store's entire computer system had suddenly gone down and none of the cash registers were working. I just couldn't face pushing a cart down the aisles of yet another grocery store, so I stayed and waited almost half an hour until they began to work again. People were amazingly well behaved, some even joking good naturedly with the checkout clerks.) I plan to try to spread my shopping over a couple of days this week, to avoid that insanity.

posted by: pariskleinmans at 19:58 | link | comments |