Moving to Paris
How and why the Chacon family decided to move to Paris for a year.
Several months ago, as my wife Jessica and I were driving back from spending Easter with our families, I threw out a crazy idea. Ever since Jess and I were first dating about 15 years ago, we have used our long car trips to discuss our dreams and fantastical fantasies of our future. Often we would throw out ideas and play around with them in our imaginations and while normally they would be put on the back burner, occasionally we would create a vacation idea from them or maybe even a larger life change.
On this particular drive, I started a thought with “Now promise you’re not gonna hate me…” and continued with something along the lines of “what if we moved to Europe this year…”
It was not really a particularly simple time for us to do so, in fact. I, as always, am quite busy at GitHub. Jessica had just recently been accepted into a graduate program at USF to get a second Masters degree, this time in non-profit management. Furthermore, she and I had just gone through the amazingly complicated and stressful process of navigating the SF school system and got our daughter Josie into a school we really liked. We also had unbelievably low rent for an amazing house in San Francisco that our daughter had lived in nearly her entire life, and honestly, we really love the city. Moving would mean having to give all of those things up.
However, a couple of things made the thought of moving really compelling.
For one, I’ve wanted my child to live in another country since long before I had children. I studied and loved linguistics in college and know that second language exposure before the age of 6 or 7 allows the child to more naturally pick up the grammar and phonetic range of the second language. Since Josie was about to turn 5 years old, we were quickly approaching the last chances that we would have to enroll her in a school in a country where the primary language was not English and still have her be able to pick it up very naturally.
Second, both Jessica and I want to learn another language really well. We both know a bit of Spanish and I can get by in American Sign Language in a pinch but neither of us are fluent in any non-English language. We’ve always wanted to live in another country where we could be immersed in a second language and really have the time and opportunity to get good at it.
Finally, and what was probably the catalyst for taking the idea really seriously, I think I need a little bit of a break from tech in San Francisco. As much I love the city itself, I’ve been feeling more and more lately that the city does not much like me.
I can appreciate the issues caused by tech in the city, of course. Rents are high, property is insanely expensive. If you’re not making a six figure salary, life is getting more and more difficult. As tech gets bigger in the city, more things start to homogenize, especially thanks to the incredible homogeneity of the tech world itself. On the other hand though, as an almost humorous juxtaposition, nearly any other city in the world would love to have more tech around.
Not only does it sound nice to live in a place where most people don’t think I’m causing all of their problems, I would also like to get out of the echo chamber. I’ve seen way too many times where some small, self-focused subculture of tech thinks something is important and people react drastically, but step outside of that insane bubble into the world of perspective and nobody really cares. I guess I want to live outside that bubble for a little while, perhaps catch my breath.
Finally, GitHub has the majority of it’s employees living and working outside of San Francisco. For me, getting a better idea of what that is like and doing whatever I can to help improve that situation in some way is important to me. It is important not just so that GitHub can work better for it’s remote employees, but it’s important so that perhaps some day the things that we learn doing this can help more tech companies feel like they don’t have to co-locate all of their employees.
If that is the future of tech work, I believe that cities like San Francisco would have fewer of these problems because people could more naturally move to where they want to live, rather than be where they have to work.
So at the end of May we announced to our family that we were moving to Paris for the next year. We chose the city during the car drive. Jessica landed on French as the language we should learn that would be the most useful for the things she was interested in studying and honestly, if you’re going to live somewhere to learn French, it really should be Paris, right?
So thus began our insane family adventure of picking up our lives, getting on an airplane and starting our year of life in Paris.
I thought it would be a fun idea to write about what all we’re going through and all the little things we run into while learning how to live in a new country with a new language. Everything from visa process, logistics of moving to another country, getting French bank accounts and SIM cards, to learning French, interesting cultural differences and working remotely.
Stay tuned to this Collection to get a first hand account of How a Software Developer and GitHub Cofounder Uprooted His Family to Live in Paris for a Bit.
