Kate McGrath outside her 200-year-old apartment in Paris.

Kate McGrath can’t wait to get back to Paris, virus or no virus.

“I live right around the corner from the Pompidou Center in a building that is partly 200 years old. I am at the American University of Paris, studying fashion business. I love my life there.”

Her intrigue with Paris began with an exchange program in France when she was 16, in Laon. “It’s a medieval capital in France. I lived in a tiny village outside of there with a French family for six months, and learned to speak French pretty fluently. I came back to San Diego and I had two years of high school left. But living in France made me realize that, you know, there are much bigger things than San Diego. So I applied to many, many schools, most of them in New York. I also applied to the American University of Paris, because I started realizing: why should I pay so much more money to go to school in the US, when I could pay less money and I can be in Paris? I was applying to NYU, and that was very expensive. So [Paris] was about a third of the cost, with scholarships and everything.”

Her initial lesson was how to survive in Paris on a student budget.

“First of all I realized that my friends had no idea how to cook. And I was living in an apartment with three other girls. Thankfully, I grew up helping my mom with cooking a lot here in San Diego.”

Secondly, different supermarkets have different strengths. “There are four main brands of stores in Paris. One you’d go to for their fresh produce. Another, say, Lidl, the German chain, has really cheap food. Like, tall cans of beer for 39 cents. I would cook a week’s worth of food for us. My go-to was pasta pesto with goat cheese and smoked salmon. A three-slice pack of salmon would cost maybe $3.50, a big bag of pasta would be $1.50, a big tub of goat cheese, $2.50, and with a jar of pesto, you’d have enough to feed four people, and you’d get in under $10.”

She says for the same price you can cook a chicken curry, or Korean fried rice for four. “And that would include the go chu jang,” she says.

Even when she lived in the expensive district around the Eiffel Tower, Kate and friends scouted out cheap restaurants. “A Lebanese place had this wrap, a foot-long, pretty much, for 5 Euros, say six bucks. A Greek restaurant called Apollon has a sandwich for $6.”

She says one of everybody’s habits before lockdown was to take a bottle of wine down to the canal St. Martin for evening drinks with hundreds sitting on the banks, socializing, and watching the sun go down. “No hassle from authorities, and it’s affordable! You can get a bottle of wine, say a Roche Maze, for about $3.”

But isn’t she worried to go back, with this second covid wave hanging in there? “Not at all. I’m very excited. I am 22, and Paris is now home for me. I miss my friends from the Canary Islands, Egypt, Bulgaria, Texas. I even miss climbing seven floors with the grocery bags.”