Paris v. 2

“I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.” – Ernest Hemingway

Paris.  Where to even begin? I think I, like so many before me, have fallen in love with Paris.

I arrived in the early morning on September 16th.  I was staying with some Parisian friends in their very trendy up-and-coming neighborhood in the 9ème arrondissement known, in true bourgeois-bohème hipster fashion, as “SoPi” (South Pigalle), so I headed there first to drop off my luggage and take a very much-needed nap.  With its many hip restaurants, bars, and cafés, SoPi – formerly a rather sketchy red light district – is now often compared to New York’s Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn.

At lunchtime, I made my way to the République metro station to meet my friend, Sam, a third year at the University of Virginia studying abroad at Sciences Po in Paris for the entire year. We planned to eat  at a little Italian cafe in Le Marais called Marcovaldo, but they’d already stopped serving lunch by the time we arrived.  The second place we tried (across the street) had also finished lunch service, so by the time we entered the third, Café Pinson, we were starting to get desperate (the pain au chocolat I’d eaten in the train station at 7am seemed very far away).  Café Pinson is a juice bar, café, and restaurant offering organic and healthy food.   While I’m generally a big proponent of this sort of eating, both Sam and I were a little skeptical about a vegetarian, wheat-free, and dairy-free menu in a country best known for its cured meats, baguettes, and cheese.  But the café was trendy and very cheery (a nice contrast to the horribly rainy weather outside), and the food ended up being fantastic.

Sam had to go to class after lunch, so I was turned loose by myself in Paris.  I stopped back into Marcovaldo to wait out the rain, then decided to spend the rest of the day walking.  This is my favorite way to really get to know a city: to walk it (and ideally, to get lost in the process).  You experience the city so much more intimately this way; you happen upon the most delightful little nooks and crannies, and see little things – little, yet extraordinary – that you might miss otherwise.  I have a theory about cities. Cities are living beings, with a soul and heartbeat and a personality. You can get to know a city, really know it, much more so than simply learning the streets, and how to get around, and where all the major landmarks are. Getting to know a city is like getting to know a person. If you want to truly know a place, you have to be willing to open yourself up to it, to let it in, and to be watchful as it opens itself up to you in return.

I wouldn’t see my Parisian friends until later that night, so I decided I was allowed one day to be a full-blown American tourist.  Naturally then, I walked in the direction of the Eiffel Tower.  I had seen the Eiffel Tower for the first time six years ago.  I vividly remember thinking that it couldn’t possibly live up to my expectations: that after years and years of hearing about how incredible the Eiffel Tower was, there was no way it could actually be that fantastic in reality.  And then I saw it, and I was completely awestruck.  This was my second time seeing it up close (I’d been back in Paris a couple of months ago, but as I’d been avoiding all of the summer tourists like the plague, I’d steered clear of the Eiffel Tower). It was just as incredible the second time.  I think I could see it a thousand times, and it would never cease to amaze me.

 

I walked back along the river, detouring briefly to see the Arc de Triomphe and Champs-Élysées.  By this point, I had had enough of tourists (temporarily overlooking the fact that I was technically a tourist myself), and I headed back to SoPi where I stopped into a little corner bistro for a tartine and some wine before finally meeting up with my friends.

Jour deux got off to a rather late start and was primarily taken up with more walking.  My Parisian friends had several couch-surfers staying with them for the weekend, and I had another moment (the first was when I said goodbye to Rob in Reykjavík) where I thought how strange it was that you could share an experience – as introspective and profound as traveling – with someone, and then never see or hear from that person again; we spent all day with one of the couch-surfers, a girl from Germany named Alex, and yet I don’t even know her last name or how I would contact her.  And yet, in spite of that, she will always be a part of my memory of Paris.

That night, we were having a party at the apartment, so we headed back early to prepare.  Before the party began, we went up to the rooftop to watch the sun set over the city.   I think I could have spent all of my time in Paris on that roof and never have grown tired of the view; you can see the Eiffel tower to the south, Sacré-Cœur in the north, and nearly all the rest of Paris in between. The afternoon light lingering in the evening sky casts a beautiful glow over the city, and even the rooftops themselves are enchanting.

The party itself was more or less what you’d expect from a Parisian party: lots of good friends, plenty of wine, and baguettes on top of baguettes on top of baguettes (with various cheeses, rillettes, and spreads to accompany).

I’d been in Paris just a few months before, so I felt little pressure over the next two days to do much more than experience day-to-day Parisian life and explore the city further.  Jour trois, I grabbed a pain au chocolat aux amamdes from the boulangerie across the street from my friends’ apartment, and headed back toward Le Marais, which was quickly becoming one of my favorite areas in Paris.  Le Marais, like SoPi, is one of the trendier areas of the city, and I spent a couple of hours wandering its streets before taking refuge from a sudden rainstorm in a charming little salon de thé called Paprika.

My last night in Paris, I wanted to go out into the city.  After le dîner (foie gras and a croque madame at another traditional bistro in SoPi) I took the metro from Pigalle to Châtelet and walked along the Seine until I came to Notre Dame. I love cities by night.  There is a magic to them then that is rarely present by day.  By day, cities are busy and purposeful; everyone has an agenda and things that need to be done.  By day, everyone is confined to their own thoughts and world.  The city is more closed, colder.  But at night, everything changes.  There is a different energy in a city then – a sense of expectancy, and of spontaneity.  The city becomes at once enchanting and seductive and capricious.  The lights, especially in this – the City of Light – radiate the essence of the city and the city embraces you, opening itself up.  Anything can happen then, and everything becomes extraordinary. Paris, by night, is so beautiful that it hurts.

“He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo.
Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic.
Nothing is more sublime.”

– Victor Hugo

Paris, à bientôt.