Top 10 Places: Paris, je t'aime

It seems cliché to say Paris is one of my favourite places. But I can’t help it. It just is.

I think I liked Paris long before I went there (not counting a short stay there as a child). I liked the idea of Paris, the dream of something chic, romantic, French.

I went to France as an au-pair in 1997 and my initial encounter with Paris was rather chaotic. I missed the train which left from the station near the airport and had to make a frantic rush through the metro maze while feeling completely disoriented and clueless.

I didn’t return for several months, but this was the beginning of when I fell in love. I’d been working as an underpaid, over-worked nanny. Being on holiday in Paris, free to spend my days roaming the city, lingering in cafés and indulging in wine, felt like heaven. I discovered Sacré Coeur, a beautiful white cathedral which is perched high above the vast, grey sprawl of Paris. I walked along the Seine, looking at old books in the little wooden stalls which line the sidewalk.

In the years that followed, Paris became my stopping-off point when arriving and leaving Europe. I had some close friends I would visit and stay with for a week or so at a time. During each visit, I fell a little deeper in love –exploring the Left Bank and historic places such as Shakespeare and Co., a little bookstore frequented by authors such as Ernest Hemingway, or Café de Flore where Satre and Beauvoir spent much of their days, writing side by side.

It was always my dream to live and write in Paris and in the summer of 2004, I briefly did. I rented a room in a 6-storey walk-up and staying for several weeks to work on a manuscript and spent my days reading and writing at a small table in a room whose walls were bare but for the few photos I pinned up. I slept in a sleeping bag and had little material comforts. My life was simple but full – full of words running through my mind and of a city I would never tire of discovering.