In the second semester of my junior year, I left the cold Boston winter and embarked on a semester abroad to Paris, France. I had spent five weeks in the city during high school and was thrilled that I would once again be surrounded by museums, fashion bargains, and restaurants where ordering a glass of wine was cheaper than ordering a Coke.

I spent my first two months in classes and the last two in an internship at a French fashion PR firm, but I found my most memorable experiences came outside of my structured program. I learned the beauty of traveling for cheap (round trip bus to Brussels? 34 euro.), found a great bottle of four euro wine (I can still remember where it was on the shelf in the grocery store), and got to see the Eiffel Tower sparkle every night on the hour from the door of my apartment. However, the most meaningful experience I had in Paris came in the form of the Passover holiday.

A Jewish friend had invited me to tag along for her Passover plans which included spending the first seder at a Jewish community center in the northern part of the city and the second seder at her aunt and uncle’s house right outside of the city. While I would hardly consider myself a religious Jew, I would consider myself a deeply cultural one, which is why it was important for me to actually find my way to a seder when it would have been just as easy to not go.

On the first night, we arrived at the Jewish center just before services started and were eventually directed into the area where dinner was to be held. It was then that I began to feel a pang of homesickness. I had only once before been away from my family over Passover and now yearned for my father’s casual 29 minute Seder and my mother’s matzoh ball soup. The food at the Jewish center was unlike any food I had ever seen at a Seder: lamb and roasted vegetables replaced my images of brisket and potato kugel. Passages from the Haggadah, once familiar, were now being read in a different tongue. What had once felt like a good idea soon made me feel alienated from a practice that had once seemed so obvious to me.

I sat poking at my food, having stopped trying to follow along, when I suddenly heard familiar words floating through the air: the entire room had begun to sing “Daiyenu”. While my French was hardly what one would consider even semi-fluent, my Hebrew was even worse. However, I sat in that room singing along, thinking about how those words, while I still didn’t understand them, struck a familiar cord within me. The homesickness I had had before slowly melted away, as I found common ground in the form of the Hebrew language, between myself and the French people who surrounded me. I realized then that while I could not be at home in New Jersey, sitting with my family around our dining room table, I could at least feel like I was.