Thanks for your kind words, Gianina. Yeah, that day wasn't the best day of my life – especially since I thought it was going to be my last lol. It turns out I was 'just' having a panic attack – probably brought on from contracting Covid – but I didn't know it at the time and thought I was genuinely dying from Covid. As I didn't have a carte vitale at the time, the ambulance literally drove me to an ATM and I had to withdraw some cash to give them. I was afraid that I would forget my PIN as I was still in the grips of a panic attack. So yeah, I can definitely imagine it must have been terrifying riding in an ambulance in the US. I've since fully recovered, but let's just say I didn't have the best of summers!

And yeah, being a foreigner anywhere is tough. You face a whole lot of challenges that locals can barely imagine. As I have some Asian origins, when I first arrived in Paris in March 2020, just before lockdown happened, I remember people keeping a distance from me on the metro. I would literally find myself sitting by myself because people probably assumed that I had Covid. While I can understand where they were coming from, that still really hurt – especially since I'd just come from New Zealand, which was Covid-free. But of course, people don't think like that. During the first lockdown, strangers would also give me dirty looks in the street that made me want to stay inside. Thankfully, the hostility went away after the first lockdown, but you never really forget how they made you feel.

Aside from all those negative incidents, I'm still really happy with my life in Paris and I'm prepared to minimise the negatives and just accentuate the positives – because they're what make me love living here.