This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at NYU chapter.
When Paris isn’t grey, it’s golden. And it isn’t very often that Paris isn’t grey. After three months of constant dreary skies, complete with unannounced rain or out of season snowflakes, anyone may fall into the hole I did. By hole I mean burrowing under my covers and refusing to come out until I’d watched at least five episodes of “Lost” (…just started season 4…no judgments). I was in a rut. I was homesick. I found myself relating all of my schoolwork to the beach, the ocean and the sand. I needed the sun. It wasn’t the kind of homesick that, if I had a direct flight home to LAX tomorrow I would take it, but a different kind of homesick. It was the kind that was telling me that maybe it was time to get ready to leave this fantasy European life behind, leave my hopes and dreams of finding a Parisian husband to settle down with and raise a bilingual child together, and return to the (sometimes equally grey) city of New York.
Instead, I rented a bike.
Waking up this Sunday morning, hung-over from yet another Netflix binge from the night before, something felt different. Drawing open my blinds, I was struck my something I have seen twice, maybe thrice this semester. The world outside was bright! It was glowing! It was 72 whole degrees Fahrenheit! At first I was ecstatic. Then I was confused. As I may have mentioned in a previous blog post, Sunday’s are a day for doing nothing in Paris. However, one can only do nothing for so long before one becomes nothing oneself. Okay, sorry that statement may be a little overdramatic and existentialist—blame my newfound interest in Jean- Luc Godard and the French New Wave—but nonetheless, I knew something had to change today.
Taking off on my rented bike, baguette and iPod speakers blasting in my basket, I rode around the same streets I’ve walked down before and felt young, wild and free. Snoop Dogg may be wiser than I had previously realized. Why contemplate the meaning, or lack thereof, of life (as Godard may do), when you can just rap along to a catchy tune? I stayed out until the sun began to set. The French call it, le coucher du soleil, literally translating to “the sleeping sun.” The sun, slowly tucking itself into the horizon, behind the Seine and the Louvre, illuminated the center of the city, making the water sparkle and buildings glow. It was the definition of an Instagram picture with a “#nofilter” hastag.
With only three more weeks left in Paris, I’m beginning to take back all the days I felt homesick and lonely. New York will always be there, Los Angeles will always be here, and while Paris may always be here too, it won’t always be golden.