If You Knew Then What You Know Now

When you live in a foreign country, a lot more than you might have expected can be foreign.

When I first learned I would be moving to France, a colleague whose move preceded mine offered a lot of good advice, most of which I followed. But there was one thing on his list that I didn’t get around to until I’d been living in Paris for more than a year. It was to read a book called “Bloom Where You’re Planted: How to Live in France.”

The Women of the American Church have been pooling their knowledge, compiling it and selling the handbook at the church on the Quai d’Orsay since 1970. The book, bound with wire rings, as homey as a garden club cookbook, was in its 40th edition when I got my hands on it.

Had I read that book before I moved, I would have spared myself a lot of bumbling. I would have known, for example, never to use non-French light bulbs. (“If you do, your lamp will likely be ruined, or in the worst case cause a fire because of overheating.”)

I would have had a handy guide to French vocabulary essential for situations like the post office and the pharmacy, two places where English is often not spoken. I would have known the locations and days of the week of the city’s open-air markets. I would have had a conversion table for weights and volumes for recipes. My trips to the butcher would have been demystified with drawings of various animals with cuts of meat labeled in both English and French. The confounding paperwork required for residency cards would have been less confounding.

There are pages of books, from novels to maps to advice books, well tested by the women of the American Church and their families. There is a tipping guide.

But here is the information I was most gratified to learn from “Bloom Where You’re Planted”:

Due to the stress of relocation and/or the hardness of Paris water, you may experience a change in the condition of your nails.

Aha.

Nails that were once strong can become brittle, and many people here find their nails peeling, breaking and splitting.

I was one.

I wasn’t suffering from a disease, or age, or a vitamin deficiency. The only thing wrong with my fingernails was that they had moved to Paris. They eventually adjusted.

Eleanor Miller, a colleague in Hong Kong, reports that she wished she’d known about mold. Investing in a dehumidifier was crucial, she learned â€" but not until after a three weeks of relentless rain. If she had pored over the Hong Kong Community Advice Bureau’s Web site, she might have understood the urgency.

Julie Dolan, a friend and one of the Satellite Sisters, lived with her family for a few years in Bangkok. She blew up a coffee maker and iron before someone advised her to give up on electrical converters. She found that the Australian-New Zealand Women’s Group Bangkok Guide had answers to so many of her questions â€" including information on schools for her two sons and how to communicate with a tailor â€" that she kept one copy in the car and another at home.

Tell us your experiences with life abroad. Was there one piece of advice you wished you had had before you moved? Is there one invaluable source of information about your adopted city or country that you would recommend?