City of Lights, Day 15 of 30 Days of Indie Travel Project

Parisian cliché

Saying your favorite city is Paris has become a cliché, especially for jaded young Singaporeans who already have traipsed across Europe right after their university graduation. They’ll likely tell you that while their favorite European city is Stockholm, there’s no place like home where the transport system and the government works.

(On another note, Tokyo is slowly becoming another cliché but the people here still do not think of it yet because they like sushi and J-pop so much.)

Despite what they say, my favorite city is still Paris.

My desire to visit Paris germinated after I took French lessons in university. Before that, I didn’t really know how to say bonjour and thought that the first person pronoun for all European languages start with an “I” (I and Ich).

Even after taking lessons and day dreaming of Paris, it felt like a far away mystical land.

When I finally had the chance to visit the city–money and time-wise, it felt like a dream come true. I couldn’t sleep the night before the flight so I fell into a coma on the budget airline which took 14 hours to reach Orly.

Before my trip, I was worried that Paris might disappoint me. Or I might disappoint her. 

I couldn’t do much to prevent the former from happening. But to prevent the latter from happening, I made sure that all my clothes were dark-colored or in shades of black–since it a well known fact that all Parisiannes wore black exclusively.

Turns out, black wasn’t that fashionable. I saw bright red coats and camel color jackets. 

I also found out that Paris’ mysterious air smells like. The scent of stale urine found on the underground trains and train station.

The shocking truth was: Paris is the beautiful girl you admire afar but once you get to know her (or har har “be in her”) you realize that she has her own faults (body odour in this case). But you can’t help loving her beauty, her class and most of all her non-chalance.

This post if part of BootsnAll’s 30 Days of Indie Travel Project. Day 15: City.

Blurb from the project:

We’re inviting bloggers from around the world (that means you, too!) to join us in a daily blogging effort designed to reflect on how our travel experiences over the last year – or whenever – have shaped us and our view of the world. Bloggers can follow the prompts as strictly or loosely as they like, interpreting them in various ways and responding via text, photos or video posted on their own blogs.

The rest of my posts for the project can be found here.