Fans, Frozen Towels, and the French Summer Struggle: An Expat’s Guide to Staying Cool in a Country Without A/C

If you’ve ever moved to France thinking of long café afternoons, lavender fields, and endless glasses of chilled rosé, let me introduce you to something that rarely makes the glossy Instagram reels: the French canicule: otherwise known as the annual heat wave.

Picture this: outside, Paris sizzles like a croissant in the oven. Inside, your charming old apartment feels more like a stone pizza kiln. And here’s the kicker: there’s no air conditioning. Not in your bedroom, not in your office, not even in most schools. In fact, fewer than 25% of French homes have A/C, compared to 90% in the U.S. It’s a cultural quirk, a point of pride and, increasingly, a heated debate (pun intended).

Why the French Don’t “Just Get A/C”

If you ask your French neighbors, they’ll likely have a list of reasons. Air conditioning, they’ll say, isn’t natural. It dries out the throat, spreads germs, and isn’t great for the environment. Plus, there’s a deeply ingrained belief that heavy stone walls, thick shutters, and a good cross-breeze should be enough.

Environmentally, they’ve got a point: A/C units guzzle electricity, and France has long seen itself as a leader in climate action. But climate change is rewriting the script. Summers are no longer the mild little interludes of decades past. They’re hotter, longer, and more dangerous: this year’s heat wave has been called one of the worst on record, and schools have literally had to send children home because classrooms were too hot to be safe.

So yes, the cultural debate has become political too. The Left sees mass A/C installation as environmental betrayal; the Right wants a national cooling plan. And somewhere in the middle are the rest of us, sticking our heads in the freezer like we did in our teenage years.

The Expat Experience: Hot, Sweaty, and a Bit Existential

For expats, heat waves in France can trigger something bigger than sweat. There’s frustration (“Why do we live in a place with boulangeries on every corner but no air conditioning?”). There’s homesickness (“My friends back home are watching Netflix in 19°C bliss while I’m fanning myself with a baguette bag”). And sometimes, you start questioning your very life choices (How did sleeping become the hardest part of the day?”).

But here’s the secret: those emotions of annoyance, comparison, and longing are the same ones that pop up in all kinds of expat transitions. The heat wave just makes them more, well…sweaty.

Twenty-Five Summers of Improv Cooling

Having lived through more than 25 French summers, I’ve picked up a few survival hacks. None of them are glamorous, but they get the job done:

• A continuous stock of wet washcloths in the freezer (my preferred version of low-tech climate control).

• Frozen gel packs strategically placed between my neck and my pillow at night (don’t knock it until you try it!).

• Evian spray cans, the “chic" French solution to overheating (yes, it’s just water in a can, but somehow it feels like Chanel No. 5 when you’re literally melting).

• A humidifier in front of a fan, which turns into your very own DIY “spa mist.”

• Catching a matinée just to bask in the sweet relief of cinema A/C (the film could be about paint drying and I’d still buy popcorn).

• And the ultimate guilty pleasure: frequent trips to the supermarket and lingering just a bit too long in the refrigerated aisle.

  
  

Are these solutions perfect? Absolutely not. But they’re the kind of playful improvisation that makes expat life what it is: unexpected, resourceful, and occasionally absurd.

What Heat Waves Really Teach Expats

Here’s the part I actually love about French summers (yes, even when I’m peeling myself off the bedsheets). They remind us of one of the biggest expat lessons: you can’t control the external reality. You can’t force the French to embrace A/C tomorrow. You can’t will your apartment to cool down by glaring at the fan. But you can adjust your expectations, reframe your frustrations, and learn to adapt.

And in that adaptation, there’s humor. There’s solidarity. There’s the late-night ritual of leaning out the window with your neighbors, everyone hoping for the same breeze.

The Lesson

Expat life isn’t about recreating your old “normal” in a new place. It’s about learning to live differently. Sometimes that means celebrating the Fourteenth of July with fireworks instead of the Fourth of July. Sometimes it means adjusting to a 2-hour lunch break. And sometimes it means freezing your washcloths so you can get a halfway decent night’s sleep.

The heat waves in France aren’t going anywhere, and neither is the cultural ambivalence about A/C. But surviving them teaches you this: if you can find a way to laugh, adapt, and stay (relatively) cool during a French summer, you can probably handle whatever expat life throws your way.

---

Sometimes adapting to life abroad looks surprisingly ordinary.

It can be learning a new language or understanding a different culture. But sometimes it’s figuring out how to sleep through a French heat wave without air conditioning...and eventually realizing that the way you did things back home isn’t necessarily going to be the way you do them here.

After more than 25 years in France, that less visible side of living abroad has become the focus of my work as a Life Abroad Integration Coach. I help expats and immigrants understand the gap that can exist between knowing how to function in another country and actually feeling settled, connected, and at home in the life they’re building there.

If you’ve ever found yourself comparing life abroad to the way things were “back home,” getting frustrated by the differences, or simply wondering how long it takes before somewhere new starts to feel more familiar, I’d love to welcome you into Thrive On Through Life Abroad, my free Skool community for people navigating the emotional side of building a life somewhere else.

It’s a place to talk about the funny, frustrating, complicated, and sometimes unexpected parts of life abroad...along with the bigger questions of identity, belonging, connection, relationships, and what helps the life we’re building begin to genuinely feel like home.

Come join us inside Thrive On Through Life Abroad.