Expat bonding

This weekend I went to my first Expat event in Paris, which I learned about through Meetup.com. I highly recommend checking out Meetup.com for your local area. It's a free site that has Meetup groups on a huge variety of subjects, in locations all over the world. While living in Washington, DC I participated in the French Meetup Group which had a bunch of social events and language discussions in French & English. Anyway, so when I found out I was moving to Paris I immediately joined some meetups in Paris to start meeting people.

On Saturday night I went to an Expat meetup event between the American, English and Canadian expat meetup groups. It was a scavenger hunt around Paris organized by a company called RavenChase (If you like scavenger hunts, definitely check into having RavenChase plan your next one - I've done more than a few hunts in my life and this one was quite good! They organize hunts all over the US and just started in Europe.)

I'm still in the honeymoon phase with Paris, so almost everything here seems interesting or charming to me. I realize this will change in a year or so, but I'm just trying to enjoy it now, and not annoy everyone else with my lovestruck ramblings about the city. The best thing about the event was running all over the center of Paris - we went to Les Halles, Notre Dame, Hotel de Ville, Ile de la Cite, all at night, all illuminated - beautiful!

I had a realization though. I haven't met a ton of people here yet, but the moments I've enjoyed most are when I've been invited to parties at people's homes with mostly French people (even though those events are not relaxing, and are even somewhat stressful, and I'm a bit of a curiosity with my accent and all...). So, I was standing around this bar after the scavenger hunt, and it was just like being back in America - you could speak English freely, there was American music - it just so happened that we were in Paris. And I realized that as a personal goal, I want to spend the next 3-6 months or so trying to meet French people and integrate into the culture (as much as possible, which I realize will never happen fully.). But these expat events are a great resource for when I start feeling homesick and just need to spend an evening gabbing in English.