If someone had told me when I was a child that I would live in Paris one day, I would't have believed them. A little girl from a tiny village in the Italian countryside with 3500 inhabitants.
The place where everybody knows you and your family, where moms send their children to buy the ingredient they forgot in total safety, where you create the strongest childhood friendships, where the park is the usual rendez-vous, the place where grandma serves the roasted chicken on Wednesday, the day of the local market. I've never felt bad there, I just wanted to discover what was outside this bubble.
I've visited Paris as a tourist several times and each of them made me discover a new part of the city that I loved even more. When visiting a destination, the awareness of exploring it for a limited period of time makes you eager to explore as much as you can and to catch the positive aspects, you don't have to work or to study, no obligations at all, just the pleasure of feeling on holidays.
But living in Paris is another story.
When you start creating your life surrounded by another environment than the usual one, it's the city that dictates its rhythms, its systems, its rules. Moving to a city with 14 metro lines is already a big change, believe me :D and it's not just the possible delay at work or the 50 minutes distance to reach the other side of Paris, it's also adapting to a stressful routine, many social protests, people constantly in a rush, fragile moods, a lot of pressure, sad faces even before starting their day.
Paris is extremely demanding, but she (yes, I imagine her as a charming lady) can give you a lot.
A unique architectural style (Haussmann), various cultural and artistic events, festivals and concerts of every kind of music, bars with original concepts, clubs on a peniche (boats on the river Seine) and typical terraces where to enjoy the Happy Hour culture between friends. Paris has one of the most important aerial hub in Europe which is connected to thousands of destinations in the world and it's an extremely innovative city that invests a lot into development and start-ups.
Basically the secret is to find the right balance between the two sides of the fascinating city. I love Paris on a Sunday afternoon, where people are relaxed, they dedicate their precious time to enjoy their families, to go for a walk with their beloved, to get out with their dogs, to join the weekends events... I love Paris every time I feel enriched through a visit to a museum or an interesting expo, when I meet people from all over the world and when I find the Italian atmosphere at La Felicità as a remedy to the nostalgic moments when I miss home.
Yes, I love Paris even if I couldn't live here for the rest of my life.
For now, I continue going for a run along the river Seine to the Eiffel Tower where I usually meet many tourists. I look at them and I see myself when I was at their place, I think about the deeper perception that I have of the city now. One thing didn't change : my eyes will never stop to be enchanted in front of this elegant beauty.
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