... et son amant, c'est Paris!

I can only compare being in Paris to spending time with a lover. Unless you live there, which none of my Parisian friends actually do (Anne lives in Vitry-Sur-Seine, and Anthony lives in Luxembourg), you are living on borrowed time. You obsessively explore every crevasse of its body, knowing that it's not yours to keep. Even trivial matters and petty distractions become increasingly significant (if anything in Paris can even be considered trivial), the little idiosyncrasies further endear you to your lover, in which case you willingly and intently follow any tangent course in which your lover wishes to lead you. In my case, I spent the majority of my days without a guidebook, without any clear direction, simply enamored by Paris, from the way people dress, to the types of bicycles Parisians ride, to the trinkets I might find in a shop window, to the names of streets (my new favorite being Rue des Francs Bourgeois). I would turn left or right on a whim, into a courtyard, down a stairway, onto a quay, into a church, savoring every tiny morsel that my lover allowed me in the 6 days in which Paris was in my grasp, before I had to return my lover to the arms of another.