I arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport on September 4th, 2025, and was met at arrivals by my boyfriend, standing there with sunflowers in hand. After three semesters of arriving alone in foreign cities, that detail matters more than it might sound. Paris was different from the beginning.

      I had been to Paris twice before: once for two days in 2022 with my father, and once in February 2025 to visit my boyfriend and meet his family, who welcomed me warmly and immediately. So when I arrived as an intern, Paris was not entirely foreign. But it was still France, still French, and still a professional context I hadn’t navigated previously. After three semesters of immersive student life in East Asia, I was suddenly supposed to be a working adult. In one of the largest economic capitals of Europe. 

      The semester divided into two distinct phases. From September to October, I attended language school, It was basic, practical French instruction that helped calibrate my ear and begin to sharpen the elementary things. The classes were helpful, though the real learning happened around them. Then, beginning October 6th and running through to the end of November, I attended my internship at My Private Paris, a travel and tourism company and Parisian travel agency.

      My learning goals for Paris were less clearly defined than they had been for previous semesters, which I suppose could reflect how much I had grown. I was no longer trying to prove I could adapt to a new place; I knew I could. I was no longer measuring success in grammar points. I wanted to be useful, I wanted to be good at the work, and I wanted to show up as a professional and find out what that felt like.

      The adjustment was real. My instinct, after about fifteen months in Japan and Korea, was to default to Japanese politeness conventions. I said “sumimasen” far more times than I should have before my brain finally learned to reach for “pardon, excusez-moi, and pardonnez-moi” instead. Yes, it was very embarrassing. No, nobody cared. That, in itself, became both a cultural observation and a personal growth lesson. In France, there is an expectation that you say something as you move past someone, while in East Asia, there are words to use, but it is often just as appropriate to quietly navigate around others without drawing attention.  Learning that difference resulted in an unexpected cultural observation and left me another step closer to letting go of some more unnecessary embarrassment.

      France offered a cultural model I had not yet encountered. The French relationship with work, the boundaries between professional and personal life, the organized strikes, and the genuine expectation that you are unreachable once you are off the clock, stood in sharp contrast to both the American default of constant availability and the Japanese model of near-total professional dedication. During September, Paris was in what my colleagues cheerfully described as "strike season," organized, approved, and sometimes large enough to shut down entire metro and bus lines. It was wild to witness, but it was also genuinely admirable. The French have built a culture around protecting the conditions of rest, and they live it rather than just talking about it.

      The team at My Private Paris was kind, funny, generous, and patient. They told me on the first day that I would feel comfortable before I knew it. I did not believe them. Within a handful of days, I understood exactly what they meant. The warmth of that workplace, the humor, the genuine collegiality, the sense that everyone was rooting for each other, taught me that a professional environment does not have to be cold or competitive, and that the culture of a workplace is very important to pay attention to when you are building a career.

      Academically, the Paris internship validated something I had begun to piece together across my semesters: that the most important skills I was developing were not language-specific. They were the skills of entering an unfamiliar context with humility and curiosity, reading cultural cues without a guide, building trust quickly with strangers, and staying functional under uncertainty and pressure. Those skills came from immersion. They came from having been wrong in public, in multiple different countries, and having gotten up and tried again each time. No single course gave that to me. The whole experience did, accumulated over years, and Paris was where I felt how they would work in a professional register.

      When I look back across living four semesters in four cities: Nagasaki, Seoul, Tokyo, and Paris, I see a continuous thread of expansion. Not just of language proficiency or cultural knowledge, though both grew considerably. What expanded most was my sense of what is possible: what I am capable of, what the world contains, and what it means to make a home in it. I grew up in a small town without knowing how large the world was. I know little better now, but I am still learning what to do with that knowledge, and I think I will be for a long time.