While I can say that I connected to the people in Annecy, I have done so all the more in Paris, perhaps out of necessity. Here there is no institute to be comforted by socially, there is nothing social for me at all unless I find and do it myself, so it has become some kind of game or art while I've been here. It's worked well. What I have found is that the stereotype of the rude Parisian is almost absurdly unfounded, perhaps aided by fluid French, and that if you just talk to them frankly and friendly, they genuinely appreciate what you have to say and listen to you. I have talked to dozens, if not hundreds of people in Paris. Perhaps more than Annecy, in fact, something that stuns me and also serves as a reminder that I am actually in a metropolis that has twice the population of the entire state from which I hail. There's so much energy and so much life that it's almost jarring. People are out and about, living their lives, being tourists, spending money, begging for it, working, partying, laughing, and doing everything imaginable at all hours of the day. They are always going and going and going. And they're still French, because the line they walk while they're going makes no sense. Heh.
I read that the city is the most visited city on the planet, with roughly 2 million people in it any given month of the year, and that is only taking the famed center of town within the Boulevard Périphérique into account. That is a lot of people coming from everywhere in the world. A lot. And you can totally see it everywhere you go. You hear English almost as much as French in some places, and then you hear a little bit of everything else in between. African languages with which I am unfamiliar, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and so on. They're all there, they're all seeing the same things that everyone else comes to Paris to see, of which there seems to be no end. There is always something else to see and do in Paris, and I am convinced that even Parisians never actually see or fully understand and appreciate all of the monuments and colossal artifacts of history laid out for them throughout this city. To list all of the things I have seen or done would perhaps take an entirely new blog. I don't have that kind of time.
What I do have the time for, though, is to say that despite all of that, despite the rocky start and all of the tourists and the occasionally sharp French man and all of the negative things, and indeed despite all of the magically positive things that I've seen and done so far, the city of Paris works itself into your conscience and doesn't let go. You want to stay in this city, you love this city, you "synergize" with this city because this city is so human it's hard to believe. Paris lives, sleeps, eats, and breathes the human element of its existence. Everything about it, from the way the city was built and rebuilt, to the monuments signifying victory in a human conflict, to the museums for human enrichment, to the world class universities for human development - everything is human, in a way that is difficult to explain to the inhabitants of motorized, vehicle-driven elsewhere. Very few places have I been where I feel so at ease walking the streets at any hour of the day, where I don't get lost until after getting along the same route a few times, where nothing is familiar and everything seems it all the same. I have had the sensation while walking around town of a certain déjà vu, that I never actually left my home town and that I am in my appropriate place, more than once. It happened once and then it never stopped happening. I don't truly know this city, but it feels right. It must have felt right to hundreds of thousands of other people too, because that is what it is famed and storied for. Hemingway understood, and now I and countless other people are coming to the same understanding as well.
Perhaps that is the purpose of engaging so fully in a place and time, perhaps that, in and of itself, was the reason I came to France.
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