Paris Solo Trip

On February 9, 2017 by admin

Paris in the dead of winter has a lonely air about it, or perhaps that was the feeling I looked for and discovered. Whatever the case, the loneliness I experienced traveling alone to Paris was a good kind of loneliness, teeming with opportunity to examine what was really going on deep within me, the kind where I realized I have grown accustom to time alone and have even grown to like it, the kind of loneliness that found company in the hustle and bustle of an unfamiliar city, giving my mind enough to think about and my senses enough to take in.

I anticipated spending the majority of my time listening to a carefully curated soundtrack, packed with soulful sounds and haunting melodies sung by Bon Iver and Jack Garratt. As it turns out, I spent very little time with my earbuds damming up my ear canals, almost without realizing it. The sounds of Paris – the cars whizzing past me and the occasional honked horn, the snippets of passerbyers’ conversations in their expressive French language, the sound of school kids scootering by and laughing together, the muted awe of fellow tourists taking in the art and architecture we beheld together – these sounds created a beautiful, organic soundtrack. Besides, I had spent too much time these past few months with my earbuds in, in an attempt to drown out the noise outside (and admittedly, the noise within) that my ears were in desperate need of a break.

*This written part of this blog post is unfinished (but who’s really here to read anyways?! ;))

Latin Quarter