A Disclaimer: This is my goodbye post to Paris, it is not my last blog. I still have a lot of aspects to this exchange to think about, like language barriers. But this one needed to be fresh, and half of it was written on the plane home (so you’ve been warned: this is ‘the emotional one’).

Who knew this would be so difficult? Since when was I so unexcited for Christmas, so afraid of finishing those last couple papers and exams? What was I thinking when I thought five months was a long time? When the clouds unveiled Ireland– its soaking green hills– I could almost see the vast continent beyond; I thought I had an infinite amount of time to explore every nook and cranny, every culture– everything I’d ever heard read studied about Europe come to fruition. Whatever happened I would definitely go to Florence and Berlin, and returning to London to visit my Aunt and good friend was no question. In the end none of that played out, because even though this has been the longest five months of my life– crammed full of so many amazing people, parties, and sights that changed my world– in the end it’s only five months: it’s still made up of days, of weeks, I still need to eat study sleep. A special kind of life maybe, but still life in the end. And now the plane’s landing down in Dublin again– like a movie just rewound– before Chicago. I never got to half the places I dreamed about, but I don’t mind, I will eventually.

Leaving Paris? Now that’s a different story. In answer to my first question, I think it’s safe to say that everyone who goes on exchange knew how difficult it was going to be for me. Going on exchange isn’t like any other part of life– if you have the chance and you haven’t done it yet, get on it! Who cares if it’s a so-called “useless” semester in terms of your degree requirements? You’ll find you end up learning more in that one semester than the rest of university. It brings together students from all around the world in a way that we know can’t happen again (the world is small, but never small enough to pool us all in the same place again). Add to that an exchange system that gives us the freedom to take random courses in potentially different languages, and that goes into overload: sure I’ve worked hard this term, but did it ever really feel like work? People I’ve talked to always have a longing for the place they went on exchange– always vaguely hope they’ll live there someday– and I think part of that comes from the fact that this was never exactly ‘real life’– I wasn’t with Parisians and I wasn’t doing work. These four months have been a dream; as much as I can make comparison with exchange students going other places, there is something different about Paris.

Paris has always sparked extreme reactions in me. In my first post about Paris I discussed my immediate difficulties when I arrived: I got off the metro in the 2nd Arr, and it looked identical to everything I could have ever imagined it being– and I was miserable. We went to the lock bridge and, with Notre Dame on my right and the Eiffel Tower on my left, it was too fantastic to be real; on the one hand I didn’t feel like I deserved this, on the other I was afraid I couldn’t handle it– I might have made a mistake, and there was so much money (apartments flights) and stress (visas) on the line. The next day my Mom and I checked out the school and the gorgeous– and unattainable– wealth of the Boulevard St Germain, and it began to feel less insane (wide boulevards and healthy green compared to London’s alleys, not so bad, right?). As we moved towards the smaller more Medieval side of the Latin district, the romantic charm of the city moved in, only to stumble upon Shakespeare and Company, the bookstore which first published Ulysses and which greatly featured in Hemmingway’s memoirs A Moveable Feast. At the time I didn’t realize the store has become a central tourist feature of Paris, or how obvious it is being beside the Notre Dame– at the time I thought I’d ‘discovered’ the place that would become my favorite bookstore on earth. It made me think of A Moveable Feast, how I’d never even liked it that much at the time but how right Hemmingway was; how, with all the years between us, very little had changed in this city. At its heart it was the same Paris. I thought that as we reached the lock bridge, as a Gypsy passed us asking for money. With her back hunched, her cane chipped and wobbly, her shawls ragged, her miserable figure seemed cut out of a novel or something ancient, against the 21st Century. And as the Notre Dame rung its many bells across the river, the whole city– the Louvre, the Eifel, all the people along the Seine– went under a spell, and I realized the city was like none other anywhere else in the world; Hemmingway’s voice echoing “there is never any end to Paris” again and again and again.

It’s true: Paris doesn’t end, for it’s always showing me something new. Over the course of this year, it’s meant so many different things for me. In the eight months leading up, it was always what I thought of– in Hemmingway’s memoir; in the Dreyfus Affair paper that had me scouring hundreds of newspapers because the Bell Epoque period fascinated me so much, helping me write my best essay to date; in Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education while in Winnipeg over the summer, where I could dream of that exact period and that writer’s own journey through the city. What is so amazing about this city– as I’ve said probably one too many times by this point– is how those aspects of the city are all there today. Of course, there was so much I didn’t expect once I actually got there. That first two or three weeks I experienced Paris as a tourist does: I was wowed by the art– within and of the city–, in love with the food, and drawn to the seemingly elegant and easy lifestyle. As that immediate romantic allure of the city wore off, I grew to love that other aspect– the liveliness, the crazy clubs or weird bars, the ability to bike off in any direction and find something amazing (not in those damn tourist books), the people– their style, their passion. Coming to this side brought me face to face with the less-than-great, like the tremendous homeless problem, the cruelty and apathy of such a big city, and the tremendously racist and sexist side to Paris (being a girl in this city is a very different experience). Perhaps it was still just being an exchange student, but these darker aspects always stayed in the periphery– whenever it would get me down I just had to witness a guy biking while singing opera music in the middle of the day to cheer me up.

Different sides came with different seasons. Living in a city so idiosyncratic as Paris, seasons took on different feelings and meanings than they did in Canada, and choosing the first semester meant that I could see three of those seasons. There was the stickiness of the summer, when it was impossible to concentrate in a classroom without air conditioning, when all the feelings of being lost– the joy and the fear together, when you woke up scared and fell asleep exhilarated– mixed together, when we went to crappy student clubs made drunk friends and biked home at four in the morning with only a sweaty t-shirt. Then the golden fall, when everyday could be spent along the Seine– so many nights with the wine bottle, so many days with the Ipod– when the city began to make sense and making friends took precedence over writing papers. And the winter, with the rain and the sudden realization that this is all about to end; a timer ticks above me and every weekend has to be perfect, the nights get longer the drinks grow in number and sleep time is shaved off as December gets closer. The last twelve days I kept going at a healthy four hours a night, compounded by heavy drinking and heavier goodbyes, until I felt the last of my energy go out like a ball of yarn pulled out and stretched too far.

In the same time, Paris gets ready for Christmas, and likely manages to do it better than anyone else. If Paris has some theme-park tendencies at all points in the year, it stops pretending by December, decking full displays over every street and shop window– trees are hung over the place Vendome or grown to gargantuan sizes outside of the churches, while the Galleries have lightshows across its front and Place Madeline makes a colored spotlight pyramid to be seen from anywhere in the city. God, there’s even a flashing Ferris-wheel beside Concorde! Paris was going to be its most beautiful as I was about to leave regardless, so did it really have to go quite so overboard?

On Saturday I go for a walk, wanting to clear my head from an exam full of revolutions and guillotines. I find myself wandering past streets I’d never seen, glassed in walks and lampposts that seem to light the way, stores full of antiques or unpublished manuscripts, gilded cafes full of only characters from Renoir paintings with their tuxes or frilled dresses. I know I should go home but I keep wandering. At the end of the walk I’m lead to the same lock bridge, only this time I come from the right bank and it’s night. Everything’s come full circle. The mist eats the Eiffel tower and curls its way through the towers of the cathedral, the water reflects the lights of the city and makes it an impressionist’s painting. It was the Paris I’d always been looking for. It might be a myth, it might be a dream, but it happened to me. It’s old and its cruel but it is endless, and perhaps my biggest regret is never getting to see those other sides– the spring and the early summer, the fireworks of New Year’s or Bastille day. Then again, maybe I would never get enough.

Goodbye Paris. As much as I’ll remember the big— the beauty, the art, the parties till dawn– I’ll probably think of those tiny moments even more fondly: chatting until dawn in my friend’s tiny attic apartment with the orange light; watching the performers on Montmartre with my roommate; looking out over the maze-like gray roofs into the windows and imagining all the lives that could live there– making up stories about the fascinating characters at the local cafe. It was the music, of the string band in the metro or hearing all ten bells of Notre Dame on my last day; it was peering out from my umbrella through a misty downpour; it was looking out of my balcony that night in September when I realized, watching everyone rush down below in the orange streetlight, that this is my city. One day I saw Paris as the myth, later on I saw it as a real city– now I see it as both. I don’t think I’ll ever live there again: there’s no way I can ever capture everything that happened these past four months, and I know I’d chase after it even as I’m squished in by government bureaucracy, conservatism, sexism and racism. That’s not my Paris, even though it’s definitely others’. But it just makes me think of that other (even more quoted, even more clichéd) half of Hemmingway’s line: “if you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go… it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast”. Could I have picked a better city? It changed me in ways I’ve yet to really comprehend, but everything I write now will have just a bit of Paris in it.