Paris j'adore!

It's not that I'm here on holidays. I mean, there are a lot of good reasons for me being here: I'm doing an internship for which I'll get credits back at my university in Munich; I'm (kind of) continuing a class which I took last November; and last but not least it's good (and necessary) to brush up my French, considering I'll definetely need it sometime in the future. But let's face it: the reason why I'm REALLY here is that at some point last summer I decided it would be cool to spend some time in Paris. And it turns out I was completly right :-). So let me give you five reasons why it's so awesome to be here:

• Baguette, ficelle, flûte ... I prefer white bread anyway and the French have mastered it like no one else. Even the cheap stuff from the supermarket is much better than most of the so called baguettes in German bakeries, not mentioning the heaps of good bakeries you find on every other corner.

• The metro. Well, I can understand if some people don't like it and in some stations it's quite dingy, but it's certainly got a charm of its own. And part of this charm is that you NEVER have to wait more than ten minutes - in most cases only two or three. Add to that a very dense network with plenty of interconnections and you know why buying a Pass Navigo is a good thing after all.

• The parcs. Admittedly, having a garden of our own, I don't spend much time in public parcs in Munich, but I doubt nonetheless that they are as plentiful and varied as here. Yesterday I discovered Arènes de Lutèce, an ancient Roman amphitheatre in the heart of a residential area and nowadays a popular place for football and boule.
  
  


• La Seine. I personally find it quite astonishing if a place can actually keep up with its photos. In times of Photoshop I've lost a lot of my confidence in photos. But then, you wander along the quais of the Seine, you cross over a bridge - and there it is, the most kitschy-postcard-view you can imagine. And think of all the places to have pique-niques!

• The houses - they are just soo beautiful! I'm really not the kind of person that likes wandering around willy-nilly, but Paris is an exception, so I've taken it as a habit to explore the town after work. And it amazes me every single day.

Now that I come to think about it, I realize that I've had all those feelings when I came to the city for the first time. Back then, I must have been about ten or eleven and finally seeing Paris, about which I had read and heard so much, left a very strong impression on me. However, this feeling wore off during my following visits - I already "knew" the city and was keen on seeing new places. When I came back last autumn, I hadn't been here for four years and in the meantime, had visited a lot of other places, most of them in China and Asia. And while I absolutely love China as a country, none of the cities there has ever filled me with awe like Paris does - now that I've found the right perspective again.


PS: I definetely need to get one of those T-shirts. I mean, "I love Paris" is nice, but not really French, n'est-ce pas?