How One Song Can Change Your Life

My weird, funny, yet meaningful story about how I really ended up in France

This September marks 13 years since I took a one-way flight from Ukraine and arrived in France.

However, I’ve never told the chain of events that brought me to learning French and ending up here, writing this text.

Spoiler: it wasn’t my love for France and dreams of dancing under the Eiffel tower with an accordion in the background.

The year was 2004, and I had just moved to Kyiv to study journalism.

I was walking to the university. That was the day we had to pick a foreign language to learn for the upcoming years.

There was zero interest for me in taking 45 minutes of English/week (I was preparing for the C1 exam back then) and my German was at a good B2 level (which is no longer the case today, sniff).

I had to pick a new language. So, naturally, I asked for a sign, just like any 17 y.o. girl would.

I was hesitant and I never had a particular interest in French.

Fortunately, I was passing by a bar. A song was playing.

It was K-Maro, “Femme like you”.

I was like: “This song sounds fun and it sounds French, so French it is!”

So, French it was.

I have to add a small thing here for those who are not familiar with the song. For some reason, it was considered slightly embarrassing and not really cool even though it had broken quite a few records. I had no idea! I didn’t even understand what it was about. I just picked French.

Of course, after that, I gave all I could to learning French. However, this article is not about routine and doing things. I’ve got a few of those coming up.

Exactly three years after that meaningful moment with a profound song, I moved to France thanks to K-Maro and never looked back.

Gave France my coeur, my rock, and my soul.

I even went to K-Maro’s concert in Kyiv a year later to “thank him” for that choice. I was the only person in the whole Olympic Stadium of Kyiv to know the lyrics to most of the songs.

I told this story to someone on a first date to break the ice. Oh man, the ice was broken so badly that the Titanic would have survived it. I could hear it shattering around me but not in a good way.

He laughed and recommended not to tell it around if I wanted to have friends in France. We never had a second date.

I mean, if we can’t laugh at each other’s quirks, small fails, preferences, the way we eat chicken, can’t keep surprises to ourselves, how we wake up to Abba’s songs and dance around the apartment, fighting about how to put lemons into the fridge, confessing our little shortcomings, and everything else that makes us human, what is the point then?

Today I stumbled upon…

Ok who am I kidding, I searched for «Femme like you» on Spotify and cleaned my apartment just like I did while I was living alone, cleaning my apartment to what I thought was the best song in the world. I had no idea but it had already put me on my path.

Even the small choices you make will take you right where you need to be. If it is coming from the heart and it is with good intentions, I promise, looking at it in the retrospective will be the most beautiful flashback.