From the outside, 39 rue Pergolèse in Paris’s 16th arrondissement does not look extraordinary. It’s a typical building from the Haussmann era, made of blonde-hued limestone with tall French windows and decorative black iron railings, a look that is replicated countless times in the surrounding streets.

But from the inside, the view is pure magic: For this is the building where I lived the summer between my junior and senior years in college, and where my world changed forever.

That summer was the first time I had ventured abroad. As a student of French Literature at Princeton, I was able to apply for the French Department’s Summer Work Abroad program. And with great luck, I was accepted into the program and given an internship in Paris.

Paris! City of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Victor Hugo, Sartre, Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir. And of course, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. Paris!

The program placed me with a French family: a fiftysomething mother, her mother, and a twentysomething son who had his own apartment but joined us for dinner two or three nights each week. The son spoke some English; the mother and grandmother spoke none.

Bridging that linguistic chasm became the first challenge.

Recognizing that cuisine is a universal language, my host mother kindly labored to make me feel welcome by preparing elaborate feasts every evening. At the end of my first week, she invited some of her friends to join us for dinner, and the repast was especially splendid. Wanting to show my gratitude and appreciation, at the end of the meal, I grandly pushed myself back from the table, looked with a satisfied smile at each of the friendly diners, patted my stomach, and proclaimed the sentence I had prepared for just this occasion: “Je suis plein!”

 “Plein” is the word for full, and what I meant to convey was that the meal had been so lavish and wonderful that I was absolutely sated, deliciously full. What I did not know was that the phrase “Je suis plein” has a very different meaning in French. As it turned out, when I pushed myself back from the table, surveyed my host mother and her friends with a satisfied smile, and tapped my tummy, what I really announced was: “I’m pregnant!”

This caused quite a stir!

Missteps gradually gave way to steps, and week by week, the world expanded. From 39 rue Pergolèse, I learned to make my way to the Métro, ride to the Louvre station, and walk a half dozen blocks to the company where I was working. I figured out how to attend plays and poetry readings, wrangle my French into some semblance of understandability, and navigate the wilderness of cultural differences. Most happily, my French “brother” and his wonderful fiancée found my presence to be the perfect excuse to concoct elaborate picnics and parties, and they wrapped me into their spirited circle of friends.

As the months passed, I learned to abandon my initial intimidation and wholeheartedly embrace the city, with all its pleasures and treasures. At 39 rue Pergolèse, I fell in love with Paris—and my world changed forever.

Falling in Love With Paris Again

This summer, all that magic came back to me.

I had arranged to stay in a friend’s apartment in Paris for three weeks to teach two writing workshops. A few weeks before I was due to leave, my 34-year-old son, Jeremy, asked if he could stay with me for a week. Could he? Of course! Spending a week with my son in the city that had changed my life – what could possibly be better?

It was a glorious week. Jeremy joined me and my writing students for festive dinners on the Île de la Cité and in Montmartre. We took a pontoon boat cruise past the grand monuments that line the Seine. We walked through the Jardin des Tuileries, where I used to wander on sunny Sundays, enchanted by the classical statues and the modern children sailing miniature sailboats.

I took Jeremy to Shakespeare and Company bookstore, where I had once dreamed about becoming a writer, and the half-timbered restaurant next door, Le Petit Châtelet, where I had sat 50 years before, gazing in awe at Notre-Dame and scribbling in my journal. We sat on a bench in the majestic Place des Vosges, just as I had done five decades ago, admiring the elegant red brick buildings and lush lawns, and imagining Victor Hugo descending from his second-floor apartment onto the square. We strolled at dusk under the plane trees by the Seine, and listened enwrapped as classical music descended from a chandelier-lit salon three floors above, just as it had during that first summer stay.

And I took him to 39 rue Pergolèse, where the young me fell in love with the world and the trajectory of my life changed ineluctably.

Over the course of the week, we also discovered new treasures together. One evening Jeremy’s ears led us to a violinist playing a poignant Bach composition on the Pont des Arts; without a word, we both stopped and listened, mesmerized by the sublime music and the equally ethereal sunset behind it. His research took us to Sacré-Coeur at night, where we sat on the steps with hundreds of others, locals and visitors alike, entranced by the fairy-tale sight of the lamplit city far below. And his curiosity inspired a walk down a cobblestoned alley to the turreted, château-like Hôtel de Sens with its exquisite garden, all manicured green bushes and bright orange, white, and yellow blooms.

The week became a glorious conjunction of past, present, and future. Sharing Paris with Jeremy gave me the opportunity to re-encounter the young man who had moved to Paris 50 years before and the city that had so enchanted him.  At the same time, it gave me the opportunity to see the young-me-become-now-me absorbed in Jeremy’s eyes, heart, and mind, and to fall in love all over again with the new Paris, in 2025.

This was a gift inexpressibly greater than I had ever hoped for, and it soaringly heightened my sense of how precious travel is, how precious the world is, and how precious family members are. It made everything – everything – seem more precious.

The Magic of GeoEx Journeys

Reflecting on this in the months since, I have also realized that, in a fundamental way, what happened for me with Jeremy is exactly what happens when I lead tours for GeoEx: My travelers become my family, and I get the extraordinary opportunity to show them the places that I love and that have shaped me and my understanding of the world, and to re-fall in love with those places, old and new, through the travelers’ eyes, hearts, and minds.

What a gift!

I love showing my GeoEx family the rock garden at Ryoanji temple in Kyoto, where I first learned that the key to understanding Japan is slowing down and paying attention, and the Parthenon in Athens, where the art and philosophy of ancient Greece first came to heart-filling, mind-expanding life for me.

I love showing them the rippling rice paddies and deep green cedar-covered mountains of Shikoku, and the misty wilds of the Iya Valley, where the ghosts of ancient warriors still whisper in the woods and creaking vine bridges transport us into the past. This is the Japan that enchanted me when I first moved to this forbiddingly foreign country 38 years ago, and I love introducing my American family to the people here – the master folk singer and soba maker, the scarecrow master, the extraordinarily generous president of the hillside inn – who have all become extended Japanese family for me.

In Greece, I love showing our travelers sacred Delos, the rocky, uninhabited island of ruins where I once spent the night, where the glory and power of the past still come vividly to life in mosaic and marketplace, temple and terrace. I love sharing the breath-stopping, time-skipping beauty of just-blossomed scarlet poppies against the white marble ruins at Corinth, and the Minoan magic I feel at Knossos. I love introducing our travelers to the tanner and the bell-maker, the potter and the olive oil artisan, new members of my ever-growing Greek family.

And I love experiencing the wonders of Japan and Greece through our travelers’ eyes and lives: the transporting beauty of the cherry blossoms arching over the Philosopher’s Path in Kyoto; the magic of the 300-year-old mountainside farmhouse where we overnight on Shikoku; the simple splendor of a seaside feast of freshly grilled fish, tomatoes, cucumbers, black olives, and feta cheese in Greece; the multi-layered marvels – Venetian, Ottoman, Greek – of Chania on Crete.

I’ve just finished leading a pilgrimage of GeoEx travelers to the Japan Sea coast, where we met 16th-generation potters, yakitori masters, hardy fishermen, sushi magicians, and a woman who has singlehandedly brought a remote village back to thriving life. The worlds of Japan, ancient and modern, opened before us and wove around us, just as the worlds of Paris did so many decades before – and did once again this summer.

My week with Jeremy taught me that all my GeoEx journeys are celebrations of my own precious life-lessons: how our world is composed of infinitely rich and varied wonders in landscape, culture, and creation; how sharing these wonders deepens and enriches the experience for us all; and how our common humanity spins the threads that bind these experiences, in heart, mind, and soul.

In this sense, I know now, every journey is a family pilgrimage for me, and the magic that I first found at 39 rue Pergolèse is waiting, wherever I may be.

Yours in abiding wanderlust,

Don George

Interested in experiencing the magic of a GeoEx journey? Connect with a GeoEx Expert or give us a call at 888-570-7108.