Moving to Paris the way that I did was one large, exciting leap of faith. Truthfully, the only solid facts I had to stand upon when my plane landed at Charles de Gaulle were that I was starting graduate school and someone from the university would meet me at the baggage claim. I had never physically been to the school, didn’t know a soul attending or living in my new city and had no idea where I would be living when orientation was over at the end of the week.

What I can tell you now, without a doubt, is that I was meant to go to Paris, meant to meet the people I did and I was most certainly meant to live where I did, because my sweet chambre de bonne put me smack dab in the center of the French fantasy I had been building in my mind for the past ten years.

Living on the edge of 7th arrondisement, just across the river from the 1st and 8th and next door to the 6th, I was surrounded by epic architecture, history and cultural pulse points that were all about to become part of my own daily joie de vivre. Yet, it wasn’t just the grandness of the neighborhood that hit a sweet spot in my heart – it was the tiny details of each street and the people I saw everyday from the two women who checked me out every single grocery visit I made to their Fran-Prix for a year and a half to the women of Gosselin Bakery who always maintained calm when the evening bread line stretched to the door to the butcher across the street who always smiled when I walked past. It was the crowed that always lingered until the early hours in front of Vin de Bellechasse, a restaurant across the street from my apartment, and how taking the Solferino Bridge down into the Tuileries Gardens always made me feel that I had my own, secret entrance. It was the area’s grandeur, but it was also the quotien details that made it a spectacular place to live.

My metro stop: Solferino, Line 12

Exiting the metro onto Bellechasse and St. Germain:

St. Clotilde, across the street from my Fran-Prix grocery store:

Beloved Orsay:

My backyard, the Tuileries:

Pour un cafe on Rue St. Dominique:

 

Invalides in the mist:

The seventh is not for everyone (and it wasn’t the only part of town I loved – far from it), but for a girl whose dream was to live in Paris for the first time, this neighborhood, my quartier, was the place to be.