While abroad in London, we NYU students are afforded a week off in November: Fall Break. It coincides with ‘reading week’ for some local London Universities, but I think NYU London students get this break since we don’t get off for American holidays like Labor Day and Thanksgiving. Or, maybe it exists because NYU is kind enough to give us a chance to travel and explore places that are suddenly much more accessible.
I have plenty of friends who made laundry lists of cities to hopscotch across Europe for this celebrated week. Personally, after spending a single weekend in Madrid, I knew that I wanted more than a couple of days somewhere. I left Madrid wanting more: feeling unsatisfied and not like I really saw and knew Madrid after my measly three days. Because of that trip, I knew that for fall break I wanted to really be able to say I visited a place, that I knew it, that I could recommend things to others who may one day choose to go there as well. I wanted to give one European city all the love and attention I could. So I went to Paris, France.
Paris: the city of love. Paris, who houses the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe, baguettes, mimes; these are the associations I made from the across the deep blue. These images are iconic, like London’s double-deckers and phone booths. They shaped my vision, but didn’t place me in the scene.
Before you arrive, the city is flat. Flat with pages of history you’ve read, of movies you’ve seen, of pictures you’ve viewed. The place in your mind has been concocted by countless two-dimensional images. The city lacks depth. I found this with London, and I noticed it again with Paris. Only once I walked the paths between the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower; only once I carved out the distances with my own two feet; did I wholly comprehend Paris. Pieces of knowledge joined by distances, directions, elevations. Sacre Coeur is up a huge hill, walking from the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe is doable; walking from the National Library to the famous Pere Lachaise Cemetery (where Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde are buried) is not so doable.
The city is magical, teeming with energy and culture around every corner. There were quiet swells, no lulls, I felt constantly involved in the life of the city. Sometimes, walking around NYC, I can feel the city exhale. There is a calm between lively neighborhoods, a break in the city’s anxiety–but it will inevitably swell again. I didn’t feel like this in Paris, instead I was engulfed by cobble stone paths, endless outdoor seating, innumerable alleyways, and a perpetual sense of life. I flowed from one neighborhood to the next, barely noticing any sense of transition besides the morphing en masse of shop signs from expensive clothing, to halal food, to boucheries and fromageries. Beautifully aged buildings hug me tight, making no attempt to feign modernity, embracing their history, whispering reminders of my infancy compared to the city they live in.
Paris is alive, and it has won my heart.