Moving to Paris…

Luxembourg Gardens – close to where we will be living – on the Left Bank

I am moving to Paris at the end of July 2022. Officially I will be on a visa for non-working residents for a year (and renewable with the same paperwork each year, but renewable from within France). I will spend the year trying to integrate into the culture and society of France, making new friends, volunteering, taking classes, museum-ing, traveling, reading, taking pictures, and absorbing multi-media French (news, movies, podcasts, theater). Hopefully I’ll do some blogging here as well. The best part though, is that I will be living with my soulmate, ToF (Christophe Thibaut). We have been hopping Atlantic enough over the years to have sadly left a solid carbon foot-print and we both would like to stop that insanity as well as to bring our lives into closer alignment and proximity.

Most of my belongings will go into storage, including 1/2 of the books I have acquired and kept this past decade. The ones that I have kept are more or less the ones that I had shared on the pages of this site – the ones about communication, connection, congruence, clowning, clean language, as well as a some books on dying, grieving, belonging, estrangement, and the earth/universe. There is a small collection of anatomy books and few on pain and rehabilitation are there for reference, down the road.

I also cannot seem to part with a set of 5 Cracking Chinese Puzzles books that I strong-armed my parents to buy for me in China in 1987. This is an unusual etymology book for the composition of Chinese characters, explained in English. Just one of them goes for about $60 dollars on Amazon and I sense they may be a collectors item in the future. But that isn’t why. I can’t let go because I loved learning Chinese back in my early 20s. The language is so poetic and beautiful. The book set got as far as the trunk of the car, and then I brought it back up the next day. If I could have found the right recipient, someone currently studying Chinese, ideally, then I would let them go. Sadly China and the US seem far apart culturally now more than ever, and the recent airing of the documentary on the murder of Vincent Chin on PBS reminds me yet again that integrating as an Asian into American society has been more difficult and probably always will be more difficult than my own integration into French society. France has its own issues and its political polarities also in large part driven by rejection of the ‘foreign’ especially from certain locations – the US is not among them (my privilege is showing). But there I go, the tradeoffs will be many and the books will survive their storage until I decide whether my move is permanent – in which case I will have them shipped.

On a more hopeful note perhaps, I am resurrecting an old hobby and skill for my new life abroad. I hope to find some people, expats or otherwise, to have fun playing my flute in small ensembles to revive my love for music-making. I am in the process of getting my flute’s key pads replaced and have bought a sturdier case to protect it well. A good question is – where might I practice so as not to disturb anyone? Problems to solve once all my logistics are completed here.

Lastly, I have put my U.S. business, Connections At Work, LLC aside. I will not be allowed to earn any income while on French soil, in exchange for being allowed to be in that French resident status I described above. The old company root URL – connections-at-work.com will be redirected to this blog site which I have renamed from the original Adaptive Collaborations. I will still be able to receive email at andrea@connections-at-work.com until I can clean out and save off any files, emails and contacts I will want for the future. A task for a rainy day in Paris.

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