Name: Madelyn Cline Smuggled Herself Into France For Fashion Week
Uploaded: 2026-03-05T16:48:50.000Z
Duration: 3 min 49 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Gerund

Now, Madeleine, we're so thrilled that you're here.

You just got back from Paris Fashion Week.

I lost three years of my life, maybe of my life expectancy.

Well, okay, so I had a few days off before I needed to be in Paris, right.

Why don't we just like go make pasta, go truffle hunting, you know, just enjoy it.

And so we go, we have a stopover in Zurich, and then we.

And then we land in Florence and we get to wonderful town and we get to where we're staying, which wasn't an hour and a half after we landed.

And I realized my passport has just gone.

And it's also like, I don't even know what time it is, like back here.

And so I got maybe a few hours of sleep, got up, went to the consulate in Florence.

Spent the whole day there, got an emergency passport.

Like, oh, yeah, passport F. I've done it.

And so I say that to the nice, wonderful woman at the counter, Grazia.

And she says, you can't go to Paris with this.

Oh, on a temporary passport, they will not let you into France.

That you can't travel to with an emergency passport.

And so cut to 36 hours later, I'm in a sprinter van under a blanket, crossing the Italian, French border.

And I was largely asleep for the most of it, but I could feel the van stop.

And I was like, I was dead asleep and I was.

And I heard our driver, bless his soul, he's in my will now.

He gets out of the car and I hear him talking, going back and forth between between him and some border patrol.

And we're just there and my heart's just like beating out of its chest.

And he gets back in the car, he's like, the French.

So you're in a sprinter van with a blanket over you illegally crossing a border.

Well, it's not technically illegal for France.

The lady at the Italian consulate said you could go by ground, which I think she was.

And you went to fashion week and you had a great time.

That is a phenomenal way to get in there just to do a bit of truffle hunting.

And then France went on strike, so I wasn't sure I could get home.

So here we are, and here you are, and thank God you made it.