Just like my SF Bay Area trips, these trips are often much less exciting than people think.

First of all, even though I’m calling this “a week in the life”, our average duration is around 5 days. We usually come to Paris during major holidays – Chinese New Year, July 4th, Thanksgiving, Christmas…

However, unlike our SF trips, even though Paris is technically also about a 6-hour flight away from Boston, these trips are much more tiring.

1. We almost never actually fly direct so our flights are more like 10 hours once you count the extra flying and the layover. There are two main reasons why we do this. One, it’s more expensive to fly direct. Two, the direct flights are on Air France and as long as it’s not too inconvenient, we prefer to fly Star Alliance airlines for accumulating elite miles.
2. Although we leave Boston around the same time in the evening, because of the time difference, we end up arriving in the morning/early afternoon the next day instead of early enough the same evening in order to get decent sleep. So the day we arrive is always the most tiring because we didn’t get good quality sleep and then we normally have to start work shortly after we arrive. We generally arrive on Fridays as we leave Thursday evening, but for our current trip, we actually left later because we were in SF right before.
3. The flight home is super annoying because it’s generally on a workday unless we decide to extend our stay and fly out Sunday the following weekend. Plane wifi is unreliable so I usually take the day off.

Typical Weekday:

between 9am-12pm: wake up
morning/early afternoon: errands
around 3:00pm: lunch
afternoon/evening: work, work, work
around 10:00pm: dinner
between 12am-3am: finish work
early morning: sleep

Typical Weekend:

Honestly? More of the same, except with a bit less work. Usually consists of shopping in Paris, trying out a nice restaurant somewhere, meeting my husband’s best friend for tea or dinner…

Okay, I do have to admit, the good food here is a huge pro so I guess it helps balance out the crappy flight situation. The rest is just normal family time like anyone else’s.

For this visit in particular, we focused on two main things: buying a new car (the old one is like 20 years old or something) and the next family trip to Croatia. Normally, we would have a large family dinner for Chinese New Year, but A’s uncle is currently in China and the cousins are older and busier nowadays so it didn’t happen this year.

After very little time at home for the last 3 weeks, I’m looking forward to spending a couple days relaxing before heading out on the next adventure.