I love Paris in the the Springtime.

I love Paris anytime, but it’s best in the spring. Let’s not kid ourselves.

Maybe it’s because everything, everything in the city is in bloom.

Maybe it’s because the parks begin to refill with not just plants but also people.

Maybe it’s the profusion of pretty pastel shades you see truly no other time of year.

Maybe it’s the sweet bursts of sunshine that are by no means guaranteed, making them all that much sweeter.

Maybe it’s the way that tourist season hasn’t started in earnest and you feel like the city is just yours to hoard, to secret away.

Maybe it’s none of these things.

Maybe it’s all of them.

Whatever the case, Paris, je t’aime.

Achromatique

Winter travel in Europe is equal measures frustrating and magical. You could have an adorable town, the eaves of all its snug little houses lightly dusted with snow, looking like a perfect gingerbread village… or you could have sideways rain trying to frostbite your nose. It’s the luck of the draw.

There are two distinct advantages for American tourists, to wit:

• CHEAP flights. (SO CHEAP. You can get a JFK-CDG flight a week out for less than you’d pay if you booked a June flight a year in advance.)

• If you’re not a big traveler and you’re weird about being pickpocketed, it’s much harder to do when you stuff is shoved under a heavy coat.

For Northeasterners, the weather is really a wash—perhaps slightly warmer in fact—but if you’re a weak blooded California girl (like me), pack a scarf. Or five.

You also ought to resign yourself to lifeless gray skies and nearly monochromatic photos.

I ended up leaning into all of that, with a jaunty red wool hat, long black coat, gloves (the whole nine, really), and a look of grim determination. I hopped back on the Métro and made my way north to the Porte de Pantin, right on the Boulevard Périphérique, the ring road demarking the boundaries of the city.

My goal? The sublime form of the Philharmonie de Paris.

The building was an unexpectedly transcendent delight, strangely fluid and organic, basket-woven aluminum crumpled lightly like the folds of a discarded shirt. It was the sweeping vistas down to the minute abstract details, a play of light and a glossy reflection of the wintry skies.

It seemed so perfectly parisien, nestled in the Villette Park, a modern stunner alongside wonderful museums, large grassy expanses perfect for summertime picnics, and the 19th century Grande Halle – today a cultural center, but once a massive abattoir (leave it to the Parisians to make even their slaughterhouses beautiful).

I rarely find myself more than a quick walk from either the Seine or the Canal St. Martin (my typical haunts being decidedly slanted towards the third, tenth, and eleventh arrondissements), but visiting the Philharmonie meant seeing a wholly different side of the city.

Paris never fails to surprise.

And that – after all – is why I love it best.

That Time I Got Stuck in Paris

Okay hear me out: sometimes you actually don’t want to be in Paris.

I know, I know. It sounds crazy at first pass.

But imagine, if you will. The time: Lunar New Year, laaaate January, after an exhausting fiscal year end. The place: a gate at JFK Terminal 8, having left the comforts of the gorgeous and absurdly bougie Flagship Lounge to ensure you’re able to board on time. Your destination? Reims, the heart of Champagne Country… by way of Roissy of course.

There’s some weather (January in New York, after all), but not much. Not enough to be worried. The departure time changes. Then changes again. The gate agent gets on the loudspeaker, “we have the mechanics on the plane…” and a collective groan goes up from the passengers clustered around the boarding lanes. Your plane is now out of service, but! There’s hope! They’ve found another plane. If this can board and take off relatively quickly, you’ll miss the train where your reserved seat waits, but you’ll still probably be able to make it to Pommery in time for your tour and tasting.

Not too fast! Maintenance is on your new plane. It gets brought around to your gate eventually… without the maintenance logs. Another hour goes by. Kiss your champagne au revoir. Add another hour.

Look: there is no first world problem like your flight to Paris being delayed. It is the ultimate. That doesn’t make it any easier to stomach alas.

And so, 5-ish hours later as we finally took off, I resolved not to find some alternate activity (though jaunting off on a cathedral hunt in Amiens or Chartres crossed my mind), but instead to listen to what the universe was clearly trying to tell me: SPEND THE DAY IN PARIS, idiote!

The arrival into Roissy was absurdly smooth, and I plotted out my day from the RER train into town: take Métro from the train station to my hotel, attempt to check in, get a baguette, &c.

This trip marked my first stay at the Moxy Bastille. Moxy is honestly my favorite of the Marriott brands – modern, affordable, new, and often with an excellent bar/restaurant to boot. I was able to check in relatively quickly and into a room with a balcony no less. While the weather wasn’t exactly conducive to being on a rooftop, I made quick use of it. There is little as magical as a terrace in Paris, if you’ll pardon the rhyme.

After a quick nap and quicker shower, I was off!

Pack it up, pack it in.

My favorite activity.

Weirdly, this is a question I get a lot from friends and coworkers: “how do you pack for all of your intense trips?” I think packing is absolutely a science (there is no art here. at all.) and can be boiled down to a few guidelines.

In truth, I was a terrible packer until I started traveling for business. Something about that experience makes you absolutely ruthless – do you want to be weighed down by three unnecessary pairs of shoes and an oversized toiletry case as you sprint across Charlotte Douglas trying to make the last connection of the night? No! You will sleep in Charlotte, and that’s rarely pleasant.

The beauty of it is that the skill has extended to my personal travel, to the point that I can confidently take a three week trip (between late Spring and early Fall) with just carry-ons. Goodbye, lost luggage. Hello, never having to wait at baggage claim.

I highly recommend it.

For the past year, I’ve been traveling with an Away rollaboard. I only bought it because a friend gave me a gift certificate for Christmas last year but really leaned into the whole millennial thing with the color scheme. In truth, I was always a backpack traveler (see: sprinting across CLT), but I love their bag and it’s easier to carry atop a rollaboard than a shoulder, so here we are. I hate to be a cliché, but they are excellent pieces of luggage and the price is right.

I picked the pink (this one is called Striped and was limited edition… it’s not Blush which is still available but a tad more saturated) because I didn’t want to be yet another person with a Black/Navy bag and run the risk of getting accidentally grabbed by someone else while deplaning. People love to make comments on my ridiculous pink bag and honestly I’m here for it. There probably isn’t a more on-brand Mik bag, if I’m being honest.

Sidebar: this looks like an ad. It isn’t. I’m just really happy with my luggage.

I have three key pieces of packing advice:

1. Pick a color scheme! A capsule wardrobe will never serve you wrong, minimizes pieces while maximizing options, and keeps you from being indecisive. I will typically pick one or two neutrals (black or navy or white), one color (usually red or pink), and one accent (usually ends up being blue or yellow, but I would love to do green one of these days).

2. Always carry silk scarves! They can jazz up outfits, keep your hair out of the way, serve as a makeshift sling, double as jewelry, keep your neck warm. Truly the best thing, and as an added bonus they take up next to no space.

3. Wipes! This is a hold over from my backpacking days. Look: are they the most environmentally friendly thing in the world? No. But you don’t always know when you’re going to have access to a sink. Sometimes you’re so gross and sticky and miserable… a wipe can fix at least part of that. If you’re traveling traveling there’s a good chance you’ll get yourself dehydrated at some point and nothing feels better on a red overheated face than a cool wipe. Trust.

On travel, lassitude, escapes, and quotidian pleasures.

“J’ai quitté Paris et même la France, parce que la tour Eiffel finissait par m’ennuyer trop”

— Guy de Maupassant, La Vie errante

I left Paris and France as well, because the Eiffel Tower finally succeeded in boring me too much.

Actually delicious coffee at Peloton – a Parisian novelty if I'm being truly cynical

I named my site for Maupassant's classic travelogue for so many reasons. His winding path is one I've taken (though not in the same order and hardly all at once), and his itchy wanderlust is equally familiar. The opening line (above) is one I've memorized; it is hilarious and somehow something I both deeply understand and can't begin to fathom. The tower is not for me, but there is not a thing in this world that could bore me into wanting to be anywhere other than Paris.

If you switched out the city and country, though, the sentiment is one I feel in my bones. I get restless – I always have. Modern sterile vapid New York made me feel that way constantly when I lived there. Both the cold glass monstrosities and the tower in their own times are symptoms of a cultural ennui of sort. If the zeitgeist leaves you uninspired and apathetic, you have to change the place... if only because you can't change the time and you most likely can't change the culture.

There's a pretention about Maupassant that clearly resonates with me as well.

People watching on an early morning in the 9th

Paris is one of a handful of cities that serve as excellent antidotes for me. Modern and energetic (the two traits of New York I quite like best), but new (for me) and different and fascinating. Parisians are somehow able to care about work, business, finance, but not let them become all consuming. Most importantly for me, food is a shining star, not an afterthought or a backdrop as it so often is in New York. I relish it, I thrive, I fairly hum.

Richer's deceptively simple breakfast tartine

At odds with my search for the new is the way I return to some places nearly every trip. Having regular spots in a city over 4,000 miles away from your legal residence is horrifically bourgeois and  stereotypically millennial, though despite my misgivings and guilt I've built a repertoire over the years. I have a set of Parisian rituals: ride a bike, buy a baguette, listen to Yann Tiersen by the Seine, flip the door handle on one of the old metro lines, wander the Tuileries as the sun goes down, jazz. It's a city ridiculously easy to romanticize.

I do have the particular advantage as well of having a dear friend who lives there, in that oddly liminal existence of an ex-pat. He has given me a few of my favorite haunts, and I've found a few more in my stolen days here and there. And since this is ostensibly a travel blog, I'd like to share a few.

Saturday Jazz (be still my heart)

To visit (photographs throughout, in order):

• le Peloton, 4ᵉ
• Richer, 9ᵉ
• La Fontaine de Belleville, 10ᵉ

Peloton is a Fernando find – which automatically means it has the added benefit of being aesthetically pleasing. Photographers, you know. It's a perfect, easy, casual café. The type of place you can drop in for a quick pastry and coffee (thankfully, not French coffee, which is frankly garbage), or sit and work for hours.

Next is the restaurant that sold me on the idea of moving to Paris one of these days or another, Richer. For me, it's the perfect idealized neighborhood restaurant: casual too, but absolutely put together (the basic American notion of the Parisian style across the board), excellent food and drink, leisurely paced. I've eaten there at every time of day and never once been disappointed.

Finally, another stolen spot: La Fontaine de Belleville. I go for one thing: Saturday jazz. And the requisite food and drink. Cosy and enveloping in the winter, lush and airy in the summer. It looks the part of a Hollywood stand-in for a Parisian café but is so much more.

Drinks at La Fontaine de Belleville