DESTINATION: Paris

That’s the first thing I saw when I plopped into my seat on a September Saturday at New York’s JFK airport. My wife Corey and I had finally untethered ourselves from our Los Angeles apartment, our car, our boxes of belongings, and to some degree our lives in the States. On the precipice of a nomadic life in Europe with no set end-date, we felt ready to try something new.

While from the start to the finish of our travels we’d end up fully circumnavigating the globe, I took vacation for some of that and thus spent the bulk of my working time in Western Europe. We’d chosen Europe because its timezones were feasible enough to work from, because the strong dollar made it affordable for us, and because it holds so much of the West’s cultural history. Neither Corey nor I had ever been to a good number of its most famous cities; now — post-marriage and pre-kids or mortgage — felt like the right time.

Since I’d read A Moveable Feast during my brief months of unemployment between college graduation and the commencement of my first full-time job, I’d held a romanticized notion in my head of what living and working abroad might look like. My mental image stemmed from the very first chapter, where the narrator would sit in a cafe, take a drink, observe, and write.

“Then I went back to writing and I entered far into the story and was lost in it. I was writing it now and it was not writing itself and I did not look up nor know anything about the time nor think where I was” — Ernest Hemingway

This period in my life was of course another transition period, but unlike back when I’d read that book, this time I was employed and married. While I’d need to be as focused as ever during my workday – hopped up on espresso rather than an aperitif – I figured that living in Europe full-time would provide me with ample opportunity to indulge in a bit of reflection and creativity à la Hemingway.

But if my European workday wasn’t going to feature me sitting in “A Good Café on the Place St.-Michel” and drinking a rum St. James, then what would it look like? To answer that question, let’s

Step into my (mobile) office

My whole company is a fully remote company. I don’t need much for my workspace – a table, a chair, and a computer would suffice. Still, there were three slightly more unique things I needed in order to be maximally productive while mobile.

The first was a portable monitor. It’s difficult to get work done as quickly when I’m limited to one screen, as I often work on tasks such as drafting my team’s goals while simultaneously referencing the list of potential projects. So just before I left the States, I bought a fold-up monitor that only needs one cord in order to work.

The second was a standing desk. My back has bothered me since my days of playing college football. At one point during my first job, it seized up so badly that I couldn’t go into the office and I had to work from my couch in full recline. The doctor recommended I stand for 15 minutes every hour, so I’ve had a standing desk ever since. Now of course my at-home standing desk was too bulky to lug from airbnb to airbnb in Europe, so during my travels my ‘standing desk’ became a rotating cast of characters: the top of a Parisian refrigerator, an Istanbul kitchen cabinet, a Florentine bookshelf.

*My Parisian Office (fridge not pictured)*

The third was less tangible but perhaps the most important: the willingness to work strange hours. Most of my teammates work on east coast hours, i.e. UTC -4 or -5, and I’d be in time zones ranging from UTC proper to UTC +3. At peak, between me and my teammates on the west coast, there would be an 11 hour time difference. As a MAT Lead, which means I manage a cross-functional team, I have to be on meetings pretty frequently, so let’s just say I had to be ok with working late into the night, though my company’s asynchronous communication norms (mostly via Slack) helped a lot. One time, in order to talk with someone in LA while I was in Istanbul, I had to call at 7am my time to catch him at 9pm his time. Honestly though the hardest part was probably just

Settling In

During regular workdays I often take a short mid-afternoon nap, as doing so is actually optimal for cognition based on our natural circadian rhythm. During my first full workday in Europe, my cousin Malcolm texted me that he was in Paris and would swing by and say hi. This was soon after I’d eaten dinner, and my circadian rhythm was still off, so instead of a post-lunch nap my body wanted a post-dinner nap. I had 30 minutes until he’d arrive and figured it’d be fine, as my naps rarely last longer than 20. Yet I’d underestimated the jetlag and surfaced nearly an hour later to missed calls and texts, the upshot being that I’d missed him.

Morning coffee is an important part of my daily routine, perhaps the most important part. The first thing I noticed about our Paris apartment was that it didn’t have a regular coffee maker but rather had a Moka Pot for making espresso. No matter – I could figure it out. I went to Carrefour City, and while I couldn’t quite read the labels, I could tell which coffee was ground, so I picked the cheapest one, took it home, and after watching a youtube video on the Moka Pot process, I plugged in the beans. Apparently though I didn’t screw the top on tightly enough, because when the water started to boil it spurted out across the entire kitchen. So I tightened the top, and it ultimately worked, but it tasted awful. And I’m no coffee snob; I drink it black and am just here for the caffeine content. But this was too far gone; it tasted how I’d imagine rat poison to taste. While cleaning up, I unscrewed the top and, strangely, the coffee grounds had all but disintegrated, leaving a dark sludge behind. That’s when I took out my google lens and translated the coffee container and it finally came together – it was instant coffee.

*How it looked after I worked out the kinks*

Simple actions that I took for granted in the States became more challenging. For example, getting a package delivered from Amazon. Long story short, I had to order on their .fr site, they delivered through La Poste, and ultimately La Poste failed at delivering my package because of miscommunication between the two companies. Then there was when I had to print & mail tax documents. Let’s just say that it consisted of a lot of miming, an airdrop, and a refund for buying the wrong type of mail. And finally, there was the US general election. We requested mail-in ballots, and since I no longer trusted overseas mail, I had my mother-in-law mail them to my company’s office in Toronto for me to pick up during an all-company event in October. They were delayed, but ended up arriving hours before I left for the airport, so Corey & I did successfully cast our votes.

Now once we’d settled in, what did a typical

Day in the Life

look like? Usually I’d wake up at 9-10am, catch up on slack messages, exercise, get lunch, start working in earnest at 2-3pm, and ultimately sign off at 11pm-midnight. Then I’d relax and read a bit before going to bed at 1-2am.

After that initial snafu, my espresso-making abilities improved significantly, and despite always buying the cheapest (non-instant) ground coffee, it tasted better to me than most cafes, even in Paris and Milan.

Just as in the States, I relied pretty heavily on takeout food – sometimes local flavors, sometimes the type of food you can find anywhere. For instance, I find comfort in healthy hearty food like poke bowls and burrito bowls, as I needed lots of mental energy for work and couldn’t always spend it on searching for unique local flavors. But I found plenty of memorable weekday takeout spots – from La Brigade in Paris (steak frites), to Takos al Pastor in Madrid (eponymous), to Notalho in Lisbon (secretos de porco preto), to The Dream’s Salata in Istanbul (eponymous), to Giannasi 1967 in Milan (kiosk of Italian flavors), to All’Antico Vinaio in Florence (schiacciata), to Jiamo.Lab in Rome (eponymous).

Occasionally I’d work from cafes, at max 1 day a week; that’s more Corey’s vibe than mine. I’d get annoyed when hit with minor delays, such as when I showed up at Corey’s favorite spot Le Grand Breguet, but they didn’t allow people to only get coffee between 12-2pm and I’d already eaten a sandwich jambon fromage from some boulangerie, so I went next door to Ten Belles, but they didn’t have wifi, forcing me to bum off Le Grand Breguet’s signal. Not really worth the bother, though in Paris our apartment was so small that sometimes I had to get out of the way just to give Corey enough room to exercise.

On Fridays, I’d save my early afternoons for trip planning. Before we’d left, I’d booked our first three airbnbs, but had planned only a few activities. So on the fly I’d be booking train tickets, museums, flights, hotels. The 1-2 hours on Friday often weren’t enough and it’d spill into Sunday night after we’d gotten home from exploring.

Work trips were the least-routine part of my routine. Throughout our 10 months abroad I flew to Toronto as mentioned above, London for a travel industry conference, Nashville for a MAT Lead workshop, and Palma for a supply workshop. The London and Palma ones likely wouldn’t have happened had I not already been “in the neighborhood” in Madrid and Rome, respectively.

Obviously though, I didn’t travel to Europe just to work. I did maintain a decent

Work-Life Balance

and fit in some good ole exploring. On Fridays I’d stop working early (for me) at 9pm local time and my wife and I would go out to dinner for a little date night. But I’ll get more into the culinary deets in future blog posts. If you think this is long, just imagine if I went into bite-by-bite detail…

Weekends were full-on exploring, of course. Another topic for a later post. But we’d occasionally do a bit of exploring during the weekday too. For instance, I wanted to minimize lines at some of the crazier tourist attractions, so we visited the Eiffel Tower, the Vatican, and the Galleria dell’Accademia (home of the statue of David) all during weekdays. I’d make it home at right about the time when my colleagues in North America would be signing on.

One night in Milan I’d wanted to watch the first leg of the Coppa Italia semifinal in which AC Milan squared off against Inter Milan in their version of a crosstown classic. Thought that’d be a fun one to watch out at a bar to get the local feel. The game started at 9pm, but unfortunately I had a meeting conflicting with the entire first half, so I just ended up streaming the second half on my second monitor while working. The blue & black stripes ended up scoring late to tie the red & black stripes.

Sometimes even just sitting in an airbnb and working was imbued with local flavor. In Paris and Milan our windows looked out onto cute courtyards. From those in Florence and Rome we could see mountains in the distance. In Istanbul, all would be silent when suddenly a chanting would erupt from the minarets of our nearest mosque, so loud that it could be heard from anywhere in the neighborhood. This happened 5 times every day, as one of the hafizes blasted out the adhan, or call to prayer.

*One of our neighborhood mosques in Istanbul*

In Rome, during our taxi back from dinner at Tonnarello Scala, we passed a long line stretching out from the Museo dell'Ara Pacis, and learned there was some sort of free museum night going on. I wished that we could stop and join, but we had to fly out early the next morning for a work trip to Mallorca. I could feel our time on this adventure starting to slip away, could feel discipline constrict spontaneity. I felt better the next morning when in our taxi to the airport we drove past the Colosseum, casually as if it were just another building to pass during a morning commute.

*No, we did not take Vespas to the airport, but that would’ve been cool*

Now as I sit back in the States writing this and bidding

Farewell

to our time in Europe, I reflect on how different the experience felt than how I’d have expected it to feel.

In the years of the Renaissance, back when Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo Galilei lived there, modern scholarship argues that Florence was the intellectual capital of the world. Similar deal with Paris, albeit a bit later, as detailed in a favorite book of mine, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris by David McCullough. You can make up your own mind on what’s the intellectual capital of the world today, but in my opinion it’s not in Western Europe. Americans travel to Europe today in search of an extension to their playground – think of all the study abroad students in Florence and the party animals in Ibiza – and I can’t say I’m all that different.

A rare moment that obliquely met my expectation of a creative experience such as Hemingway found in his cafes came when I sat alone in Les Philosophes in Paris, sipping wine and munching on steak tartare & foie gras while waiting for Corey to join me from the vegan restaurant she’d stopped at. As I sat & sipped, I wrote notes for this very blog, and while doing so realized that I no longer needed my Hemingway Cafe moment; I’d had it four years ago on my solo road trip that inspired this blog, during which I’d often pause to write notes in restaurants or on hiking trails, publishing the posts later on from my hotel room.

As a married man – versus in that summer of 2021 when I was very single – I no longer needed solo soul searching, I needed to create experiences with my wife while it’s still just the two of us. We’d said when we were dating that one day we’d travel around the world and live in 4 continents for 3 months each. Well, we didn’t do exactly that, but we came pretty close with 12 countries in 10 months: France, Spain, Portugal, England, Canada, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Türkiye, Italy, and the Vatican. We’d lived one dream and now arrive home to turn more of our dreams into reality.

*Carrying the bags is part of the “husband” job description*

As a business school grad now 9 years into my career, I need to keep advancing it, and despite all this traveling I delivered strong results for my team and also engineered a switch from my functional role as a TAM (Technical Account Manager) to one as a Product Manager.

As a monoglot, I finally dipped my toe in speaking other languages for real (not just inside a classroom). My Italian got minorly better (“vorrei un caffè doppio per favore”) and my Spanish got majorly better (“me puedes ayudar a encontrar una lavandería que está abierta aunque hoy es un día festivo?”). Connecting the etymological similarities between the two languages was underratedly fun – for instance “derecho” vs “dritto” vs “direct.” Or “leer” vs “leggere.”

*Conversing with a Madrid local in broken Spanglish*

Overall, I thought I’d have way more time for everything than I ended up having. The trip ended up feeling like a rush. Parts felt like “living” in Europe, but parts were just regular traveling albeit at a different pace. At the end, my mind felt like a chrome browser with too many tabs open; I was ready to crash and focus back in on my life in America. The nonstop packing and planning – with us having to take 5 transatlantic flights in the spring alone between work and bereavement – drained me. It’s a satisfied exhaustion, but exhaustion nonetheless.

*My company’s office in Toronto, our last stop before returning home*

*Our seven homes abroad: Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, Istanbul, Milan, Florence, and Rome*

September 2024 to June 2025

Thank you for reading! I plan to continue these posts with deeper dives into each location, including our Honeymoon in Southeast Asia.

Around the World in 129 Workdays

Club Kitsune