The day after a Trans-Atlantic flight is never pretty.  Dehydrated and discombobulated, we did very little day except nap, eat, and drink.  Actually, that’s pretty close to a standard day off now that I think about it. 

Our flat is quirky, and was built in the 16th century.  Stuff is tucked everywhere on shelves and in drawers.  I found a drawer full of defunct currency from mostly Asian countries, for example.  A full-size grand piano sits in the living room.  It’s unclear how this magnificent instrument even entered the place as the door is not wide or tall enough.  Neither is the curving stairwell.  I feel like this is the owner’s super elaborate she-shed.  She lives in the flat below.  When there are no guests, she uses this place as an office and practice studio.  There is enough sheet music in here to open a music store.    

I’m writing at her desk.  Our host seems to work at a management consulting firm, but before that was clearly a musician.  She’s a career changer, like me.  Unlike me, she’s divorced.  A big, yellow file folder sits on the shelf rather conspicuously labeled D I V O R C E.  

When you tell people you’re visiting Paris, a frothy helping of opinions bubble up.  We got emails chocked full of suggestions and personal anecdotes of where we must go and what we must do.  Everyone seems to own a piece of Paris and wants to share that piece with you.    

This doesn’t happen when I travel to other places.  Nobody says to me, “Oh, there’s this really amazing pub near Trafalgar Square you just HAVE to visit at dusk on a full moon in Fall.”  People feel a kinship to Paris, and it captures the imagination in a way other cities do not.  They loved going and want you to feel the same swoon, the same lusty feels, they experienced.  To do that, follow these recommendations, a recipe, they have now provided.  

“It’s interesting to me how everyone’s Paris is so different.”

RBD

Paris seems more a mood than physical destination.  To announce, “I’m going to Paris,” could easily describe your willingness to fall recklessly in love as travel to the capital city of France.  I am not an emotional person.  I feel uncomfortable when people emote at me, though I realize expressing emotion is a healthy and normal part of the human experience.  I just don’t trust emotions.  Often they lead you astray.  Expressing them in a healthy manner has been a life long struggle.   

Which is to say I have never fully understood this thing people feel about Paris.  It’s just a concrete arch, it’s just a strange looking metal tower, it’s just a big house with dusty mirrors and gardens, let’s not get carried away with ourselves and make declarations that won’t age well in divorce court ten years hence.  RBD actually helped me understand it.  Amongst the electronic deluge of information lovingly directed into our inboxes from friends and family, she said, “It’s interesting to me how everyone’s Paris is so different.”  We began to notice the Paris people raved about, the Paris others so very much loved and wanted us to love, described them more than the actual city of Paris.  At some point, we gave up trying to integrate all these versions of Paris because we had so many suggestions.  (Just please don’t tell anyone.  I don’t want to seem ungrateful.) 

Maybe this is true for every destination someone offers you advice about.  It feels more prevalent with Paris somehow, certainly enhanced by its reputation as the city of love.  What does that even mean?  Nobody can even count how many times the city has been invaded.  Parisians barely tolerate you attempting French, usually politely responding in English hoping you’ll cease mangling their mellifluous language.  Apparently, at street level, love goes but so far.   


Let’s talk facts, a domain I like much better.  The City of Paris has about 2 million people, though over 12 million live within the larger, metro area.  To compare, The City of New York has about 8 million within the city limits and about 20 million in the metropolitan area.  The U.S. city of Chicago is actually more analogous to Paris than New York.  Their GDPs are pretty close, too, cashing in at around $700 billion.  Plus or minus, it depends on who you ask and how you tabulate the data. 

One thing unusual about Paris is its age:  It’s old.  People were successfully living in the area before the Romans showed up in 52 B.C.  It was a small but important trading hub in those early years, and has slowly become the city we know today after enduring 2,000 years of riots, wars, invasions, strikes, rebellions, plagues, regime changes, the actual Renaissance, and slap bracelets.  Entire religions, languages, and empires have come and gone.  Paris, somehow, still glistens despite it all.  Maybe the city chose to focus on love because it’s witnessed so much ugliness?  

I’m not going to discuss everyone who either invaded or ransacked Paris.  To be safe, just assume everyone has at some point.  If they haven’t, they likely will in the future, so sit tight.  This seems to be Paris’s role: to endure humanity’s bad behavior and continue on with style, grace, and saturating levels of butter in food, to choose to be happy.  It takes fortitude to repeatedly get gut punched, only to rise again and offer the world croissants and macarons.  Personally, I’d be bitter.         

The city itself is arranged into twenty arrondissements, which is just a municipal district.  In theory they are logically arranged, but as a New Yorker who lives on a north, south, east, west grid I find it not intuitive.  Technically, they are numbered in a spiral.  (SO French.)  The subway system could easily be depicted as a plate of pasta.  Likewise the road network evolved, as opposed to being designed, as is characteristic of most cities, and as such makes little functional sense.  To travel 14 miles into central Paris from the airport took well over an hour. 

Paris’s climate is kept mild by the North Atlantic Current (NAC).  This current also keeps England more temperate than its latitude would suggest.  The temperature will be between the 40s and high 50s for our trip.  Paris and London are just a few degrees of latitude south of Moscow but experience vastly different winters.  The American Northeast is actually more southerly still but lives through much more snow than Paris.  It’s easier to be romantic without cold feet wading through knee-deep, muddy slush.  So the NAC drastically affects the weather here.  It originates in the Caribbean and shoots up the U.S. coast and across the Atlantic, bringing with it mild temps. 

Like with the U.S., though even more pronounced in Europe, the birthrate in France is abysmal.  France has some of the most generous parental leave policies and perks, particularly supportive programs for new mothers.  Fox News calls this Socialism.  None of these governmental programs have moved the needle much.  Women are not having children when given a choice.  I can’t blame them.  Like with the U.S., population growth would be negative without the influx of immigrants.  Like the U.S., this intense influx of non-native people causes consternation.  

Many immigrants to the Paris metropolitan area are actually French citizens, just not natively born.  Like with the British Commonwealth, you can be born in other countries and still be French or British, just like someone born in Puerto Rico is still a U.S. citizen.  This has roots in colonialism, an epically terrible world-wide experiment, which I won’t delve into.  In 2019 I wrote about this on a trip to London. 

Ultimately, Paris is enormously diverse, ethnically and religiously.  While, as a New Yorker, I deeply believe diversity is a source of strength and greater stability in the long term, I also understand there are always short term concerns.  Every country I’ve ever visited in my life — I cannot underscore this phenomenon strongly enough — has these fears: a vague notion from the existing population of being supplanted by an incoming population.  Exactly who “those people” are vary from country to country.  When I say every place I’ve visited, I mean without exception — from Appalachia to New Zealand, Costa Rica to South Africa.  It is a fear common to everyone, everywhere.  No human is immune, and this very fundamental facet of our programming should influence how to smartly approach immigration, as opposed to the current, emotional, knee-jerk reactions we see on cable news.  Climate change has already begun to shift people around.  Would you raise your children in North Africa if given alternatives, like France or England?  Of course not.  Nobody else wants to either.  Don’t act so surprised when they show up. 


Even though I like facts and data, I admit they only go so far towards the capturing the experience of Paris.  Before departing RBD and I watched the movie Finch on Apple TV, which to my surprise directly addressed this idea.  In the movie the example used was The Golden Gate Bridge.  The droid knew all the facts about the bridge, but his human inventor, played by Tom Hanks, tried explaining that the experience of standing on the bridge is much greater than knowing about its parts and pieces.  The sum is more than the parts.  This is also a fundamental aspect of all biological life I recently learned in school.  We are more than a collection of cells, tissues, and organs.   

So this trip gives us a two-fold mission then.  One, make sure mom has a lovely time celebrating her 75th birthday.  Two, experience Paris.  Using … emotions.  

I’d almost rather eat mushrooms, but I’ll do it.  Let’s all just hope I don’t start sending French poetry to you all.