Paris en rose

Ah, I love Paris in the springtime. This was my second trip to the city of lovers (boy howdy), at almost exactly the same time as my first visit four years ago. Before the first, I had just turned 21, an achievement rather deflated by the fact that the legal drinking age in Europe is basically two seconds after the obstetrician clears your throat of placenta. This time, I turned 25 in the gardens of Claud Monet and celebrated with a quiet bottle of rosé in the French countryside.

Aside from the timing, things were pretty different this time around. I saw almost none of the typical sights--the Eiffel Tower was not climbed, the Louvre (and its line) was bypassed with a shudder, red said "stop" at the Moulin Rouge. So what, I hear you asking, did you do all week?

The short answer is, I went native.

Cafés, cafés, cafés...Paris is simply covered in places to sit, drink and watch the world go by. So sit is what we did, with glasses of vin or cups of chocolat depending on the time of day, watching people walk by and judging their nationalities based on their shoes. In between cafés, we walked for, literally, miles, averaging about eleven miles a day of Parisian sidewalks and quais. Breakfast was croissants, lunch baguettes, dinner crêpes salées or steak frites or, a little less traditionally, pitas grecs in the Latin Quarter. Once in Belgium, we walked less and drank more, ordering beers from abbeys founded centuries before. We sat along canals and read along the Seine. We went to sleep early in hotels, hostels and bed and breakfasts. C'est la vie.

I know people who don't like to go back to anywhere they've already been. I can understand this impulse, a need to see everything new--to see everything--but I don't share it. I like revisiting places; it seems to give me the best indication of how I've changed through the years (this is the less infuriating explanation for my desire to watch the same movies and read the same books over and over again, instead of trying anything new). Friends and family have been asking how it feels to be 25, and while I don't feel any different to myself, Paris felt different to me, and so I know I've changed.

Very little funds left now for travelling--a short jaunt to Copenhagen planned for June, maybe a mini-break in the Scottish countryside in July. And then, back home to les Etats-Unis and the one thing I've missed while studying abroad: nacho cheese.

Au revoir, mes amies!