Paris announced itself slowly. There was no grand reveal, no cinematic moment of turning a corner and gasping at the Eiffel Tower. Instead, there was a Tuesday morning in early March, the kind of morning that still can’t decide whether it belongs to winter or spring. I stepped off the train at Gare du Nord into a crowd of commuters who moved with the particular urgency of people late for something. I followed them out, pulled my coat a little tighter, and walked south with no plan beyond a coffee and a croissant.
The first two days belonged to the neighborhoods. I walked through the Marais, where every second doorway seemed to open onto a courtyard hiding a gallery or a garden. I circled the Île Saint-Louis at dusk, watching the Seine catch the last of the light. I got lost near Belleville and ended up at a Tunisian restaurant where the owner insisted I try his grandmother’s recipe for brik. It was perfect. Paris, I was learning, rewards aimlessness. The best discoveries came when I stopped trying to find anything in particular and simply paid attention to whatever appeared.
By the middle of the week, I had settled into a rhythm. Mornings at a different café each day, always ordering the same thing (un crème and whatever pastry looked most golden in the case). Afternoons at a museum or a bookshop. The visit to the Musée d’Orsay was the highlight. The “Impressionism and Fashion” exhibition traced the relationship between what Parisians wore and how painters saw them, and it changed the way I looked at every Renoir I had ever seen. I stood in front of one particular painting of a woman in a striped dress for so long that a guard came over to check if I was all right.
On my last morning, I found Du Pain et des Idées almost by accident. It sits on a quiet street in the 10th arrondissement, its original 19th-century interior still intact, painted ceilings and all. I ordered a pain au chocolat and sat on a bench across the street to eat it. The layers shattered. The chocolate was dark and barely sweet. I thought about all the mediocre pastries I had accepted over the years and felt a small, private grief for them. This is what Paris does to you. It recalibrates your standards, gently and permanently. You leave knowing what things can taste like at their best, and you carry that knowledge home like a suitcase you didn’t pack but can never quite put down.