About Unwritten

Week three in Paris is, unexpectedly, the hardest.

Week one is adrenaline. Everything is charming because it is new. Even the confusion feels cinematic. I was wide-eyed, jet-lagged, waking up at 3 a.m., and puffed up with the belief that I could master this city with enough sightseeing and courage.

Week two is performance. You start to believe you have found a rhythm. You know which metro exit leads closest to your office. You know exactly how many turns and traffic lights it takes to get home from the station, and the four-digit code plus five-digit code at each entrance of your building before you can finally reach the 1×1 sqm lift that carries you up. You order baguettes as une baguette, and without pointing. You think, maybe, you are getting the hang of this.

Week three humbles you.

Your French vocabulary stretches only as far as politeness. Bonjour opens doors but does not always carry you through conversations. You cannot help but feel bad when you see your colleagues struggling to find the right English words to explain things to you, meetings that start in English but drift into French later. You sometimes stand there smiling like a decorative plant while words fly past you. You nod and try to piece together meaning from gestures, and context clues like a detective.

And then there is the morning RER platform.

Every day, without fail, there is that smell. That unmistakable, nose-wrinkling, why-is-this-legal scent of stale urine rising from the corners of the station. It greets you before the train does. You try to ignore it. You fail. Not far from it, you catch sight of someone carrying everything he owns on his shoulders, without shoes, in two-degree cold, stepping out of the metro. It is a difficult sight to hold, and you wish you had a few euros on you to spare.

Here, the contrast is sharp. Paris is breathtakingly beautiful and unapologetically messy at the same time. Ornate balconies above, dog poop on the pavement below.

Week three is when the honeymoon phase ends and the real relationship with a city begins. This is when you stop seeing a postcard and start seeing a place. The charm remains, but it shares space with small daily negotiations with the question, Pourquoi es-tu ici?

Adaptation is not a straight line. It is a series of tiny negotiations between who you were, where you came from, and where you are standing now. You carry your habits with you, your standards, your senses, your idea of normal. A new city does not erase them. It gently challenges them.

So yes, week three is hard. Harder than week one. Harder than week two. Because it is the week illusions fall away and truth walks in.

But it is also the week you begin to grow. You start smoothing the wrinkles. You notice the small wins. You hold on to moments of goodness and learn to steady your emotions.

You’ve got this.