parisian memories

{Photos: Tom & I}

Sitting in the middle of a patents validity trial paper today got me daydreaming about Europe and how I just wish I could teleport myself from my study desk to experience Summer in Paris. It's been almost five months since Tom & I visited and perhaps five months too late to post these photos. However, photos of Paris cannot go unshared and flipping through these on my laptop makes me think about how beautiful the city really was. I think when I first wrote about Paris on my blog, I was actually in Paris and writhing from so much pain - having caught a bout of food poisoning and spending the majority of our week there attempting to recover whilst watching the rain fall 24 hours a day from our apartment window. It was not a comforting scene to accompany my uncomfortable, sick self. Coupled with the fact that no one understood our attempts to speak broken French or English - though I did happen to have a meaningful conversation in mandarin with the Celine eyewear shop assistant at Galeries Lafayette, I was not in a good mood! I think I wrote about how overrated Paris was back then.

But now, I kind of miss the place. I miss the architecture and how it sort of reminds me of a romanticised London. I miss the quirky Parisian ways - I have never seen anyone park their car so close to another and I can confirm that when people drive their cars out of their spots contact with cars on both sides is guaranteed. Not something that I'd be very pleased about if I were in Australia (given this pretty much happened to me a few days ago when someone drove into the back of my car) but apparently it is normal in Paris as evidenced in the photo above. I would also be lying if I said I didn't miss the food there - sure I got sick of baguettes after the third day however the variety of pastries, cakes, breads and cheese and chocolate stuffed buns in each local boulangerie (or bakery) meant that you could visit the same shop for a couple of weeks and still not have had the chance to try it all. In Paris, open air flower stalls were everywhere and bottled water (and alcohol) was sold at the cheapest prices I had ever seen. 0.20 euro for 1.4 litres of water! And it gets even better when you start noticing that Parisians like to face the street when they sit outside bistros. When I met with Typhaine on my last day there, she revealed that it was because Parisians love to watch the street and people as they eat.

For me, it's the little things like this that made Paris a place to miss. Tom & I barely visited many tourist attractions properly as we were feeling too sick to travel far, so the experiences we had walking down the streets of central Paris near our apartment are what form the majority of my Parisian memories and are the things that I miss most. I hope you enjoy these photos from our time there!