Is Paris Hot?

If you want my answer to be “no”, just stop reading. I won’t even apologize about it. I know we all want Paris not to be Hot, mais c’est pas la vérité. Paris is Paris for a reason. Even when she is cold and sharp, she’s a dream. I am here to report what it all is.

Alors, je vous écris de Paris. I am mildly tipsy, as I often am when I report from a European city on holiday. I am taking a last bite of a feisty chicken pita that I picked up on my way home after sharing pleasant beers with friends and friends of friends in a bar covered with passport photos of previous drinkers. The raw onion tucked into the folds of the paper wrapping will soon take hold of my hotel room, but I’m okay with that. When I walked into the shop a couple of storefronts ahead of my hotel, I imagined the pita would be akin to a döner mit alles, a Turkish variety of pita I learned to love in Berlin, but this sandwich features more tomato than garlic and lettuce. I often make this mistake. It is delicious regardless.

Earlier this afternoon, I met a friend and her close childhood friend in the Marais first for a coffee and then for a long, chatty meal. You’ve heard of this friend: she once stood in front of a mirror and determined that because she was Hot, God was Hot, too. She’s delightful. Today, she, as she often does, asked an important question: is Paris Hot? Bof.

Paris. Agh. I really, really wish to be sitting here and writing to tell you all that this city is overrated, obnoxious. That, as others have said before me, it is dirty and silly and uninteresting. I wish that were among my slate of options. But it is simply not the truth. Perhaps New York has softened me to an urbanite fondness for the “big bad city”, but I couldn’t imagine a more intricate, luxurious metropolis. In each corner, Paris has something new to offer me: the golden streaks of a sunset, a digital self-serve kiosk to buy votive candles in a church, another line of six-story white housing, a river. And that’s if I focus only on what I have seen when I look up and away: nearer in, my feet have stepped over mosaics and tile and the most perfect lost notes from children and adults alike. One must be rather numb not to see Paris for what she really is.

This morning, the city was periwinkle. A quiet haze hung over the rows of stories of limestone well past sunrise, such that I never felt fully awake. I am tired—I haven’t recovered from leaving Marrakech a couple of days ago at six in the morning, and, before that, a few nasty turns at jet lag, and, before that, a nasty cold—but as the clock ticked into the afternoon, I realized that Paris wants me to see her through drowsy eyes. Despite the sophisticated carvings lining every joint, this is a city to be taken in gauzy. I understand why the impressionists widened their strokes to capture the city—there’s so much beauty here, too much, perhaps. We mere mortals are incapable of taking it all in.

I was twelve the first time I visited Paris. I travelled with my parents and younger brother, and we did all the things that one would expect to do—the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower (which, as a friend lovingly pointed out, isn’t even really a tower), and Notre Dame. We ate dinner at a bistro called Le Chien qui Fume, and we complained that French food was nothing more than bread and meats. We took the Eurostar from London, where we visited my grandparents, and, somewhere along the journey, I made a false movement and cramped my neck such that I couldn’t move my head freely the entire time. To look up at the Eiffel Tower, I gingerly lay down on the ground while my parents looked down on me in disbelief. I think I loved it anyway.

While I was at university, Paris was a convenient stop between the Americas and the Gulf, and I’d often extend my layovers so that I could say hello to the Seine. On a few of those visits, I was accompanied. During my later college years, I dated someone who spent formative years in Paris, and he showed me around his version of the city, pulling me away from the typical attractions. We visited markets in Le Marais and a pub along the Canal St Martin, and shared fruit on a little corner of the Ile de Cite, where one could be, for a moment, alone.  Before that visit, I met up with a friend, a different man, who also finished his school here and insisted on our sitting on Les Invalides and looking up at the tower while sharing a bottle of wine. That time, at least it didn’t hurt to crane my neck.

In two weeks, I’ll be celebrating my thirtieth birthday. I don’t feel afraid or hesitation. I mostly feel awe. I’m old enough, and lucky enough, to say that I’ve visited Paris more than once. I’m old enough to need to sift through boxes of memories to identify exactly when I was here last. I’m old enough that each version of me who has visited this and other cities is ever so slightly different but slowly more herself. And, more importantly, I’m old enough to admit that, when I hold my wits about me and look long enough at the dense fog of life, what I most want is certainty that another birthday will come.

But enough existential musing. I must get back out there before I leave for the airport in a couple of hours. Croissants must be eaten. Awkward French must be spoken. And later, as I roll away toward Roissy, I’ll think about visiting the Met once I am back in New York. I'd like to stand in front of Pissarro’s seasonal interpretations of the Tuileries and imagine the next time that I can amble among the gardens depicted in those subtle streaks of paint. How old will I be? Who will I be with? What things will I learn that I don’t yet know? More importantly, how Hot will I be? Whatever the answers, I look forward to meeting the next version of me who returns. xx