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Tell the world, I’m coming home.

(I wrote these last three posts from CDG, still asleep, still feeling the rush of coup de foudre that I always feel in Paris…)

And then it was time to go home. Again.

I am at the airport, waiting for my flight home. So many people got me here to Paris. But one, in particular, deserves thanks. So, thank you. It is absolutely true that this trip would not have happened without you.

Everything about this trip has been to different, and yet the same as always.

I met new friends, and reconnected with old ones. I met ex-pats from all over the world. They all say the same thing: Paris called to them because she is in her blood. The fact is, she is in mine as well.

Since coming to Paris three years ago I have found a new kind of happiness. It’s the kind built not on making demands or trying to create things out of nothing, but a happiness born out of a rise in self-love and self-esteem. I can’t say it enough but the thing I want for A is that she will always know that wherever she believes her dreams can be realized, that is where she should go.

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Le Progres…The Future of Paris Is Now

I met my wonderful friend, Fatma, for dinner on Saturday night. I can’t explain how much I love her and how our friendship feels like we have known each other for all of our lives.

We met in Montmarte, where else?  We had the good fortune of getting the last seat at Le Progres, a restaurant that has always been packed when I visit Paris,

We sat down and, over a bottle of wine and a delicious meal, talked about our lives over the past year, Like me, Fatma spent her birthday on her own, in the middle of changing her life. I love that she doesn’t realize her strength or her beauty, but everyone around her notices. She has the heart of a warrior, and the instincts of a mother lion. That we have become friends is only surprising because of how random our connection was.

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Le Baillene…The Whale Lives On…

Where our Morton Salt Girl takes a vacation.

Yes, this title has little to do with anything other than I was fascinated by the sal de la mer of France. The mascot is a giant blue whale and when I tried to explain to my dinner host on Friday night that we have a a little girl with an umbrella he looked at me like I had just told him I had hidden away the treasures of Constantinople in my purse.

They get a whale. They do not get a girl with an umbrella.

When we last posted (we, me, I, whatever), I was on my way to Montmarte to meet my new friend for dinner. What he hadn’t exactly said is that he would be cooking. In France, I have been invited to so many homes for so many dinners that it makes me long for the 1970s when all of the houses in my neighborhood were open at all hours for food, games and candy.

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It’s 3 a.m. I Must Be Hungry

I tried to write this on Wednesday night. You know, live blogging and all that. I didn’t get to send it because right when I hit ‘post’ my Internet crashed and down went the story, never to be heard from again. I wrote about the Louvre and meeting my new friend for a drink.

I wrote about walking to the Marais area of Paris, which is where many of the Jewish and Gay families live.  Do you capitalize the word ‘gay’? I don’t know but I like the look of it.

We drank for a couple of hours and talked about travel and wanderlust and families. By the time we realized it was time for food, it was after midnight. Unlike NYC, Paris doesn’t always stay open for random food attacks. When that happens you have two choices: home cooking or, as I experienced last night, making do with a two-liter of Coke Light from a gas station.

When in doubt go with the home cooking.

And here is where I extoll the virtues of Paris, yet again. Instead of starving, new and old friends came together and found out that a can of tuna, homemade pasta sauce and fresh vegetables makes a most fantastic meal.  Since my first trip here three years ago, I have been invited into the homes of strangers, yet they aren’t strangers, they’ve become friends and I think that they are what makes me love this place so much.

As a little girl, I was always the “new kid” in schools so I had to learn to adapt.  I found that it was always easiest to adapt when I was just being myself. As an adult, that belief still gets me through most, if not all, of the things life sends my way each day.

When traveling, do you find that you stay to your usual routine or do you step out of your comfort zone and say ‘oui’ to new things?

Never Make Eye Contact…Never Look Up

The thing I remember about my first week living in New York was the constant reminders I got from my then-husband to stop making eye contact with strangers and to never look up at the tall buildings.

Twenty years later and I still forget these rules. All the time. I make eye contact. A lot. And I am still surprised when people grunt back at me after I say hello. It’s the part of New York I hope to never get used to.

I love that when I am in Paris, people not only make eye contact, they often say hello then ask me where I am from and what I am doing with my time here. I love that when I am here, I can look up without strange looks.

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The Louvre: A Live Blogging Event

Day two of the ‘Bubbles takes Paris’ tour continues.  Or, as it is known by those in the know…The ‘Paris has taken Bubbles’ tour.  Day one was spent sleeping the daylight away, so I will write about my night later.

Right now I am at the Louvre, one of my favorite places in the the world. It won’t matter how many times I come here, I will always find something new to see.

Before I bought my ticket, a sweet woman asked me to take a picture of her in that classic “I am taller than the pyramid” pose. Six shots later and we had a winner.

The Louvre closes at 9:45 tonight so I have just over three hours to find new loves. Every time I come here I search for Cupid and then The Lovers. It seems like I am always on the hunt for new examples of love. Thankfully, they are everywhere in this beautiful city.

I will find something special for all of my friends. Something I think they would enjoy, some new art to embrace. So many of them don’t realize I wouldn’t be here without them. So I don’t tell them, but I take them with me on my travels that way I never feel alone.

Paris in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1….

I just popped a bottle of Schlumberger Gold because I feel like many of my days this year will need to be filled with bubbles and a hint of nectarine.

And I’ve packed for Paris because I leave in hours, not days.

Okay, there’s more, but it all seems to surreal now. For two decades I said, to anyone who would listen, that I wanted to visit Paris. The more I traveled to other places, the more I wanted to see this city that seemed to be the one place that I couldn’t get to for some reason.

Three years ago I traveled to Paris without a plan. If I had thought about a plan, I wouldn’t have gone. I would have told myself I was insane. I didn’t speak French, I didn’t know anyone and I had never been to a foreign country without my employer being a buffer and helping me set an itinerary.

What happened was magic. I fell in love. I fell in love with a city and her people. But mostly, I fell in love with myself.

I had missed ‘The One’ so much on that trip and like a child, I had hoped that maybe, just for a few hours, I would have seen him. That wasn’t meant to be our story. Not then.

Tonight, on the eve of my third trip to Paris, I am amazed at who I am today versus who I was on that first trip. Paris still awes me. I don’t know how people there go to work with so much history and so much passion in the air. But maybe that isn’t mine to know. Maybe, for a girl from San Diego who had a dream of one day living in New York, then dared to dream just a little bit bigger, maybe Paris is just what I imagine she is: A home for those who, before finding her, wandered.

From New York City, With Love.

As a non-native New Yorker, I had an image in my head of what it would be like to live here and none of it managed to match the actual awe of moving here at 20.

I was such a kid when I got here.  I had never seen buildings so big, or people who moved so fast. I’d never had such delicious pizza or so many types of ices from street corner vendors.  And I had never seen so many people live in one space. And I loved everything about this place from the hurried strides to the lack of eye contact to the funny smells in summer and the snow storms in winter.

I loved getting on the subway and getting lost, or not. And I embraced everything I could, as quickly as possible. I wanted to be a New Yorker, but without giving up my San Diegan accent (rnje not orenj, sound it out, you’ll see what I mean).

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Saying Something Stupid Like “’I Love You”…

A friend of mine suggested that I find a hot French guy to take a picture of me in front of the Eiffel Tower. My answer: Hot French Guy…so redundant.

Three times this week I have been serenaded by strangers and each time it was to Frank Sinatra’s ‘Something Stupid.” Each rendition began with the same lines:

‘I can see it in your eyes
That you despise the same old lies you heard the night before
And though it’s just a line to you, for me it’s true
And never seemed so right before’

And, like any woman, I giggled each time out of what, I’m not sure. All I am sure of is that French men have a way of charming even those most serious looking New Yorker.

I went on 7 dates in 8 days when I visited last year. I had coffees and ice creams and visits to parks and bottles of wine and each new date brought some interesting thinking out about how Americans date when compared to their French counterparts.

Looking back, I remember wanting so hard to blend into Paris. I didn’t want to be ‘too’ anything because I was looking for anonymity and instead, I found myself talking to almost every stranger who wanted to practice their English.

What I learned is that French men say exactly what they are thinking and they are surprised to hear that just maybe, men in the United States might be just slightly different.

That learning lesson stayed with me when I arrived this time around. Again, I thought I’d be here in this beautiful city have nothing to say or at least no one to say it to, and again, I was wrong. This remains one of the most friendliest places I have ever visited. People are helpful, and funny and sometimes, they sing to strangers.

And what is it about this place that inspires such friendliness and feelings of love? Everything. From the food, to the colors of the sky to the architecture – there is nothing not to love about this place.

You could fall in love just with the various shades of macaroons like the ones I nibbled on today from Biscuiterie de Montmartre…

Or searching for windmills could do it, like the Doux Moulins on Rue Lepic…

Maybe it’s the merry-go-round at the #12 Metro Stop at Abbessess…

And if that isn’t it, I am sure it is Espace Dali, home to the largest exhibition of Dali’s work in Paris…

I even find love watching the painters try to get tourists to stop for a few minutes while they sketch out portraits (and yes, I have one, drawn of me last year by a French-Polish man who recognized my cheekbones as being quite Polish).

Every new street I found today, each new shop, every small child chasing a friend or two, and even the small traces of snow that fell last night all combined to make me fall in love all over again.

I am a cliché and I must say, I embrace it fully.

There is an irony to this point in my life. I am at that age where I can do just about anything I want. I have raised a child, sent her off to college, work full time and try to be a good friend to those I know and love. All of these things should combine to make it easy for me to say ‘Paris, let’s you and I fall in love’ and yet, just as I am ready to go, life seems to be saying: Where are you going?

And I’m a little confused by the forks in the road because in some ways, I want to take them all, but in grown up land, you have to make choices.

Today, I am choosing to wander Montmartre and taking in all of the tiny little cobblestone streets that I missed last year and later I will enjoy my Saturday night with friends.

I’ll worry about things like ‘what’s next?’ tomorrow while I’m off looking for trinkets that say “I was here” because in life, isn’t that what we all want? A reminder that we were someplace grand?

 

Photo Caption: Montmartre, Paris at night (2012), photo taken by Dee Dee Mozeleski

Coup de Foudre..Part Deux

It was just about a year ago, almost to the day, that I came to Paris and fell in love.

No, not with a boy, but with a city, and in many ways, with myself.

I thought the trip might be a fluke. One of those once in a lifetime things that we get to experience just so we have memories to make us smile later in life.

Since I just knew that I would never get to experience that much wonder and love in once place again, I decided to go all in, as they say, and enjoy everything Paris would offer.

What I hadn’t expected was to be so different when I returned to New York. Sure, I hoped I’d feel ‘something’ but I wasn’t sure what that would look like. In my wildest dreams, I never imagined how much this city would give me or how much I would give to it in return.

I still carry an article with me that I happened to find in a magazine I packed for my first trip here. It was a story about a woman who had spent years dreaming of Paris. For one reason or another, she never got here until after she had ended a long-term relationship. She said that within an hour of being here she felt an intense love and knew she never wanted to leave. So she didn’t. She now owns a tour company that caters to women who want to see all that Paris has to offer.

That article goes everywhere with me because, in many ways, it sounded like me. In some ways, it already is me.

Coup de foudre. Lightening Strikes…and something unforgettable happens.

That’s what being in Paris feels like – especially the second time around.

Last year I made a promise to do things differently, to let people and things go that needed to go and to embrace new things and ideas that needed to be embraced. What happened was so shocking that I often wonder why I didn’t get it before. Life seemed so much more clear. Oh, sure, it could be the fact that I’m turning 40 this year, or the fact that A is happily settled at Penn State or maybe it’s all the talk of writing and the actual writing or maybe it’s just not feeling so burdened anymore.

Whatever it is, I feel fortunate to be back here in Paris. I am still awed by its beauty, still shocked by the friendliness of its people, still charmed by my cute little studio apartment in Montmartre, still fascinated by how this place makes me feel.

New York feels like this to many people. Millions go there to find themselves or what they imagine themselves to be. For me, New York has meant a home and career and friends and family. However, the anonymity it gives to so many is something you don’t get when you put your whole being into being there.

But Paris. Oh, Paris. Here I can be anything or anyone.

And what’s most amazing is that I still choose to just be me and the city is okay with that. Yesterday I spent my time at Notre Dame and the Latin Quarter. Today, it will be the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower.

Tomorrow? Who knows? But whatever it ends up being, it will be great because there is no pressure to ‘finish’ anything, only to start new things.

For a girl who grew up only dreaming about cities like New York and Paris, this feels like I’ve won the lottery.

 

**Photo Caption: Rue Cortot, Montmartre, Paris (2012); photo taken by Dee Dee Mozeleski

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