Remembering Paris

By Amy

I've been thinking alot about Paris lately. Maybe because it's been six months since I've been there. It's seems like forever ago and sometimes it seems like it was just last month. I'm done with my scrapbook and sometimes when I look at it I think, was I really there?

I have a page in the very end for my final thoughts and feelings of the whole experience. It is still blank. It's hard to come up with the right words. How do you describe it? The whole experience in just one page? How can I write in words what it was like to step outside and breathe in the morning air that smells sweetly of pastries but sour like yeast, mixed in with the fumes from cars. Or the first time I laid my eyes on the Eiffel Tower and how my heart seemed to expand with the amazing beauty of it and how my sister just could not stop giggling from the pure joy of just being there. Or when we were invited to a real French home by a real French family and they fed us a delicious meal and we were treated with incredible hospitality. They made us feel like we really belonged.

I keep trying to find some quotes about Paris that really sum it up. I'm still searching. The closest that I found was in a fictional book I was reading by Harlan Coben.

"Much has been written about it's beauty and splendors, and sure, that was true. Every building was a mini architectural wonder, a feast for the eyes. Paris was like the beautiful woman who knew she was beautiful, liked the fact that she was beautiful and, ergo, didn't have to try so hard. She was fabulous and you both knew it.

But more then that, Paris makes you feel-for lack of a better term-alive. Check that. Paris makes you WANT to feel alive. You want to DO and BE and SAVOR when you are here. You want to feel, SIMPLY FEEL, and it doesn't matter what. All sensation is heightened. Paris makes you want to cry and laugh and fall in love and write a poem and make love and compose a symphony."

Maybe I'll just write that in my book. Every word of it is true.