Another day, une autre memoire.
The months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds are counting down until I go home (unless, of course, a marriage proposal occurs..... boys? You there?) and this experience becomes an etching of my past. And so, I take all opportunities to use those eighty-six thousand and four hundred seconds in the day to as much of their potential as possible.
Today I started this by sleeping in.
Doh!
Take two. I got up, chucked on the Van Morrison and danced in the shower to Brown Eyed Girl whilst lathering my hair with the pitiful residue of leftover shampoo in the bottle. Eventually made it to Victor Hugo metro stop after a little journey across paris on lines 12 and 2 and decided that the day was just two good to not walk through, so my coffee and I wandered down the leaf-covered Rue Bugeaud to Dauphine to commence a agonising search for a free space in the library and to work begrudgingly on an assignment for law.
The day really turned around when I found that I had finished said assignment and I made plans with Arielle to meet for coffee and chats. I took us to Café Loustic on Rue Chapon just up from the Pompidou and we both fell in love. With the service, the quality of the coffee, the cherry bread and carrot cake, and the atmosphere. Disappearing into a small café as the sun kisses the earth before retreating to bed is the best way to do it. As you leave, the world is different. And it's not just because your eyes have been widened from the caffeine hit. Hues of the darkest grey (but never black) and warm orange and rouges quietly dazzle the small streets as the hum of the metro beneath your feet and conversations in apartments above welcome you to the night. It becomes romantic, though it was already so.
Walking home in the early evening is always a treat here because the nocturnal world emerges. People do not retreat, but they find comfort in new company and new adventure unlike home. It's a city thing. But I think it's more so a Paris thing, as even in London or in Sydney or Melbourne, the feeling I had in those places was always rushed and hardly jovial.
I look forward to one day resuming my comfortable placement by the sea, riding my old rattly firetruck red bike along the river and afternoon beers and schnitty with work friends. I look forward to restarting life aaaaaaall over again back home in Australia. But this place, I feel, will really put a new spin on what life was like back home before. It will positively and forever taint "home".
It will be my moveable feast.
