Allez Les Bleues!!!!

It’s nearing 2 am now, and I’ve just returned home from a number of hours, and a lot of ice cream, at a little shop where I was writing a paper. Crazy how the scenery can change so much, but the activity can remain the same. I’m sitting in my favourite place of course, the rooftop, watching the searchlight from the top of the Eiffel tower swing its slow gazeacross the gabled rooftops and Mary Poppins chimneys of Paris. If I wait a few minutes I’ll get to see the light show: the whole of the tower, top to bottom all covered in a billion blinking points of light. It hours now since I was at a bar with Armand and Mathieu, jumping around as France wrapped up its convincing 3-1 victory over Spain in the World Cup. The street below me is still mad with honking and flag-waving. It was as I was riding my bicycle home, with the refrain of the Marsailles ringing in my ears and a blizzard of feathers from some street-scene pillow fight gone horribly right floating around my head and marking my path with their swirling and diving, that I realized I’ve fallen in love with this city. But some loves you eventually have to leave. I leave in three days for Amsterdam. There’s so much I still want to taste of Paris. But unlike a lover, a city will always stick around for a return visit. That said, as people change, so do cities. There will never be another visit to Paris that will feel like this one has. The city will lose and gain and so will I. This has been a special month and the only place it can really live the life it deserves is in my memory. Pictures and stories are blinks of an eye. A faulty noggin is the only place where the real experience will live, and change, and get fuzzy in spots and eventually be gone. It’s sad, but it’s life. Thank you Paris. I’ll hold this summer in my memory until it fades from view. At that point all I’ll be able to cherish is the knowledge of a memory. It won’t be enough, but it’ll be all I have and I’ll be glad of it. C’est la vie. And there go the lights. Such timing! Bon nuit, à la Ville des Lumières.