Doing My Own Thing

There's something oddly tranquil about wandering Paris alone.

My friend, Shannon, came to visit this past weekend.  Sunday afternoon I went with her to the airport to catch her flight back to Rome then I had the rest of Sunday already in Paris.  I had no idea what to do.  I made plans to hang out with a guy who lives in my building, Anton, in Paris but it would be several hours before he got there.  I decided to explore the city on my own for a bit.

My parents and my aunt and uncle are coming to visit in mid-July.  My aunt has rented us an apartment in the 17th arrondissement (district/ward) wanted me to check it out before everyone arrived.  I started off my afternoon alone by taking the metro up to the apartment.  It took about 30 minutes by metro.  On one of the trains had a street performer playing reggaeton on the accordion.  

I checked out the apartment location and neighborhood.  It's in a really quiet, cute area just north of l'Arc de Triomphe.  After looking at the apartment I had another hour to kill so I decided to do something I had never done before.  I went to a cafe alone, sat down, and had afternoon coffee.  This seems fairly innocuous, people in Paris do it all the time, but it's something I had never before fathomed doing.  To my surprise, it was actually very enjoyable.

It was about 4:30 pm so the cafe was mostly empty.  The servers were really nice to me and it was very relaxing to just sit alone and sip my cafe au lait.  

I sat at the cafe for about an hour and then met up with Anton who's from Russia.  Neither of us had a plan so we just wondered the parts of Paris we had never seen before while talking about school, life, and the cultural and political differences between the USA and Russia (What can we say? We're international business nerds).  

While exploring we found ourselves in Parc Monceau in the 8th.  It was a very cute neighborhood park with almost no tourists.  We felt like we were finally seeing the real Paris, not just the tourist attractions around the Seine.  

We walked around northern Paris for a couple hours and then determined it was time to find some semblance of dinner.  We decided to get a little group together so I sent out a few texts.  About an hour later we were seated in a park on the left bank of the Seine with some more international friends in our program eating bread, cheese, and drinking cheap French wine (cost about 7 euros, so it would have been about $50 back in the states).  

All in all it was a day of doing n'importe quoi avec n'importe qui (whatever with whoever).  There was no agenda and there were no time limits.  It was possibly one of my most interesting and fun days since arriving here in France.

This coming weekend will be the exact opposite.  Tomorrow evening (Thursday, April 8) I leave for Rome.  It will be my first time in any European country besides France.  I love how travel is so cheap and easy over here.