In 2004, I spontaneously move to Paris.
I had gone there for a week, liked it and decided to stay.
I was lucky enough that I was in a position to do something so left of centre! The truth was I had escaped a horrible toxic and broken love affair in Australia and I was very happy to be in Paris, the city of my dreams.
I was able to speak French, because thankfully when I went to the venerable University of Tasmania, I majored in French!
So after a few weeks in what would be the equivalent of an Airbnb now, I decided to stay and was magically able to pull off what Parisians later told me was a complete “miracle” as a foreigner, renting a gorgeous flat.
I was in heaven. I was staying in the 7th arrondissement, the chicest part of Paris. I had the grooviest apartment owned by a Princess, who lived downstairs! Not even joking.
The first thing that I had to do after moving in, was get connected to the phone and internet.
And I’ll tell you something, nothing prepared me for the challenges of French telecommunications! Especially as, by the time I moved in, Mercury was retrograde…
Remember, it was 2004, so way before anybody had smart phones.
As a result, having the internet on my computer was basically crucial to my very survival, as I saw it! It was the only thing that would connect me easily back to my friends and family in Australia, who were all wondering what the heck I was talking about when i said I’d move to Paris!
The only fly in this Parisian telecommunications anointment was the fact that Mercury was retrograde!
Looking back now, I’m quite happy about this. It means that I might move to Paris again in the future. Quite often what we do under one Mercury retrograde, we do again another time. My (Parisian) husband and I often say we’d like to retire to Paris one day…
But back in 2004, I wasn’t thinking about any of this.
In fact I was thinking about getting connected to the Internet so I could talk to people back home and also send stories back to Australia to my editors, who had no idea of the fact I’d changed countries! (Back then, I was still a full time journalist! Although i did have one horoscope column already…)
In any case, after I moved in (which basically meant lugging my backpack up four flights of stairs and emptying it) I spent an afternoon talking to a lovely girl called Magalie at the French telecom shop. She hooked me up and I took my new French phone and modem home.
The internet thing was easy enough but what really got me was the darned phone.
Looking back now, I know it was all because Mercury was retrograde.
Mercury rules communications and telephones, amongst other things …
I’m a big one for saying that we don’t need to worry too much about Mercury retrograde, but I’ll tell you this … avoid buying a Phone in Paris when Mercury is retrograde if you possibly can!
Getting that thing working was almost the end of me.
I almost hopped on the first plane back to Australia.
The thing was that the phone spoke only French! And all the instructions were in French! And my years and years of study to University level in French had not prepared me for the vagaries of trying to get a phone working in Paris…
… It was easy enough plugging it in, but then I had to listen to all these messages about how to set my outgoing message, how to check my messages, how to work out my phone number was and so on.
I ended up in foetal position on the floor
The long and the short of it was that I ended up in foetal position on the floor of my chic new apartment, crying my eyes out, feeling utterly homesick and entirely beaten by this French telephone.
Moreover, I knew that since I had had to buy this French Phone while Mercury was retrograde, the chances were it wasn’t going to even work that well!
As it turned out, the phone worked OK … however it did breakdown in the next Mercury retrograde! And I kid you not, the one I replaced it with broke down in the Mercury retrograde cycle after that!
Obviously this is all very much a first world problem, and I still had the most amazing time during my first weeks in Paris – in fact during my entire two plus years living in Paris.
It’s where I met my husband who then became the father of our beautiful son.
So I’m not complaining.
But let this be a little lesson; if you can possibly avoid it, don’t buy a phone in Mercury retrograde.
Mercury retrograde starts just over 10 days – on May 10…
If you want to know more about Mercury retrograde, I’ve written a whole book about!
It came out a couple of years ago and went to the top of the astrology best-seller charts in multiple Amazon countries including the USA and Canada, the UK and Australia.
Now it’s been re-released as a paperback.
it pretty much has everything you could ever want to know about Mercury retrograde … so if you’re into astrology and you want to understand this very famous cycle (and impress your friends with your accurate knowledge and predictions!), click here.
If you buy the book, visit www.mercuryretrogradebook.com afterwards, drop in your transaction receipt number and you’ll also get access to a BONUS free mini course giving you some very basic astrology lessons.
Enjoy!
Not ready to buy the whole book yet? Get my free Mercury retrograde survival guide here!
