Paris.

Three weeks ago I was bent double underneath the dome of the Duomo in Florence, Italy. Despite our perilous position, my friend and I had been chatting about Paris for the last half hour.

Paris.

When that name is whispered it means everything. Love, beauty, history, fashion, war, food. It speaks of fame and poverty, glorious hope and heartbreaking loss, refined arts and desperate arts. It's a fairy tale, a dream, a nightmare, a city like all others and like none others.

I just spent five days in this famed city. That would be the explanation for my not posting at all the last week. Sorry not sorry.

While I entertained the idea of going to Paris sometime this year from the beginning, it wasn't until two months or so ago that I knew I'd make it there with part of my family. We didn't really have any plans. We didn't really know what we wanted to do. But we managed to have a good time anyway.

There isn't much that I can write about Paris that others before me haven't written already. Plenty of people have waxed poetic about the history, the people, the language, the food. Any part of the city, you name it, and people have written about it. And I don't know enough about the City of Light to even pretend to be able to contribute to the vast collection of opinions on and experiences of Paris.

But I'll tell you what I can.

Paris is a lovely city. And five-ish days there aren't enough. Something tells me that Paris deserves at least a week, maybe two. And if you're daring a month or two or three. It's easy for us foreigners to get caught up in the urge to see everything--that's a little of what happened to me.

We also walked up and down the banks of the Seine River any number of times. As always, I seem to like the water parts of the city best. 

So yes, I did go to the Louvre and some other museums. I did go to Notre Dame and another chapel, and view the city from the top of Notre Dame's towers and from the Eiffel Tower. And believe me, that was all great.

I'm a history nerd. Not everything sticks in my head, but I like to think I know a thing or two more about european history than your average person. This makes walking through a city like Paris, where practically every street corner holds a story, so much fun and so strange. It's like history at once feels closer and farther away. Seeing places helps me grasp more firmly what happened--the changing of palaces between the Louvre and Versailles, walking by street corners with plaques commemorating assassinations that occurred during the Second World War, wandering through the halls of Versailles, where treaties were signed and mobs demanded change. In Paris, pieces of history dropped into place.

Mona Lisa. As I'd been told, it's a little underwhelming.
But still cool to learn a little about.

But, as I've probably said before, for me the moments I like best are the moments no one else will experience, the sort of stories I'll tell for a while, or the sort of stories my older brother will not let me forget...

One day, I wanted crepes. We were somewhere between the Orangerie Museum and the Eiffel Tower. Not part of the city where there are a bunch of eateries. We wandered the streets for about 40 minutes making out way to the tower. We did find a little café just a hop, a skip, and a step away from the famed tower. I got my crepe. But the hunt was ridiculous enough for my older brother to immediately taunting me every time we pass some place that advertises their crepes--in France and in Barcelona.

There's a famous English bookstore just a bit away from Notre Dame. Named after the Bard, it's apparently got a famed history and been a friend to writers "Down and out" on the streets of Paris for round about a hundred years. It was a meeting place for the Lost Generation and these days serves as a home away from home to a new generation of young, struggling, dreaming writers. It has its fair share of literary minded tourists pace through its tiny aisles , but it has by no means lost its personality. Books are pile haphazardly up to the ceiling, and upstairs can be found a goldmine of old books--not for selling, but for sitting and reading in their little library. I spent round about an hour there, hunting down some good, Paris-themed books. That's a new thing of mine: I want to read about the places I've been. Read up on their history, but also dip into the literature born in these cities.


A dear family friend of hours works as a flight attendant on transatlantic flights between Minneapolis and Paris. She speaks French quite fluently, so she's the one who makes all the French announcements on the plane. Because of her job, she finds herself in Paris for a day or two on a nearly weekly basis. We knew that one of these days we'd end up on a flight with her. Just happened to be on one to Paris. So we spent our first full afternoon in Paris being guided by our friend. This good friend of ours has gotten to know the city quite well over the last few years, and I can't imagine a better introduction to the city: a walk through the city with great company and a sprinkling of history here and there.
Twenty years or so ago, when we first met, we would never have expected to meet by chance on a sunny afternoon in Paris. And what a beautiful sunny day it was.