I suppose it’s the sound. It’s always there; you can close your eyes but not your ears. Noise: it’s the scream of the drunks when I go to sleep it’s the honk of the horns outside waking me up– my lullaby my alarm. The rush of cars is a cyclone around your head, the whooshing following each footstep. It’s the sounds of a real city. And it’s exhilarating.

            It’s always there but it’s always different: sitting on the Champs Elysee now, the rush of the cars take on an echo, as dusk settles in and the arc lights up, as the hollow horns of the marching band blare to the raising of the tri-colored flag– so different from the sticky sounds of summer days, smog and haze. Bringing this many people together creates an overload, so every sense is heightened like an overtuned violin.

            Paris is my first real city. When I moved to Vancouver it was excited just to live near big buildings, but while its metropolitan area has over two million people, the city itself has closer to six-hundred thousand. So it becomes a bit of an illusion, something which becomes apparent walking down Granville street at two in the morning. It’s dead: the high rises become blocks of concrete, without lights or people to differentiate it from the darkness around it.

            Paris has the opposite effect. A picture of Paris will show you lovely boulevards, beautiful statues, and orderly apartments arranged in obsessive grids of triangles and lines. Really, the North American image of Paris is little more lively than a museum (Louvre anyone?). This image gives you nothing of its gritty underbelly, its life, its sheer amount of people.The picture at the top of this blog, which I took on top of the Centre Pompidou, is not the kind of image often associated with Paris: a view of the wing of skyscrapers of la defense, obstructed only by five to six cranes– no Churches or monuments in sight. It certainly hits closer to the truth. Vancouver: a city centralled around its skyscrapers, vacated by people at night as they run to the suburbs (ie, almost every other North American city). Paris: a city where its high rises are banished to the suburbs, as more people than a Canadian can imagine are crammed into these ‘orderly’ apartments. That description of Paris sounds closer to Mumbai than Montreal, and so maybe I’m dramatizing, but rest assured, Paris is no museum.

            A major city like Paris contains a little bit of everyone. Yes I’m looking at the Louis Viton and Dior stores as the exquisitely dressed exit them right now. It doesn’t mean I don’t have to watch my bag everywhere I go. Big city means big responsibilities, and while Gastown allowed me to stumble around extremely drunk, I couldn’t do the same in the Oberkampf here (all right I can still have fun, but no more passing out on random curbsides). Or there’s the things I’ve seen, like homelessness on a scale that rivals Vancouver as an entire city. Like the fifteen year old girl holding her twelve month old baby, cradling her silently not even bothering asking for money, on the corner of St Germain-de-Pres (one of the wealthiest streets in the whole city). Or the Gypsies who engage tourists in all their schemes and scams because they’re not allowed to work in any normal fashion. These are the things I won’t un-see.

            But a city like Paris, as I mention above, engages me in a way a Canadian city never could. Paris sprawls every which way, from the banks of the dirty historic river, to the beating heart of the arc, to the watchful Sacre Coeur on the mont, to the entangled dirty and fascinating jungle of the Bastille district. Every day there’s something new, like today when I decided to bike off in a random direction (find seven new amazing Churches on my way? classic Paris). Every night is a new bar or chance to meet new people, meaning every night holds the possibility of being the best night of my life. The classic phrase “Urban Jungle” really becomes such a perfect term, in that in this connecting concrete glued together by people and noise, each step is a step into something new, an adventure.

            When I chose Paris, one of my goals was to discover whether I could handle a big city– whether moving to a place like London or New York was just the fantasy of an inexperienced Canadian, or something I really had to do. I haven’t learned whether I can do a big city (after all, going on exchange really isn’t living in a place so much as being on an extended four month vacation). What I’ve learned is that I have to live in a place like this. Maybe it would be Paris, maybe it would be– hey why not– Shanghai. It’s not the city so much as a city. Because after these four months, I couldn’t sleep to silence again. 

Have you ever felt like the place you’re in could be very near home? Paris couldn’t be any more different than Vancouver and Winnipeg, culturally, but its climate and vegetation are remarkably similar. It’s strange: where Florida feels like it could be on a different planet, Europe’s landscape makes it feel very close to home. Paris, some days at least, could be just some amazing town I just happened to not stumble upon before.

            Well, at least that’s how I feel until I travel. Travelling, either by bus or plane, gives the context– it’s no longer a dot on a map, it’s a country, a continent. I feel like I’m a blind man in a new house– it doesn’t do to hear other people talk about places, I have to go there to smell it, to feel it, to listen. Understanding a city doesn’t mean looking at National Geographic pictures of it. Travelling to different places can tell me as much about Paris as it can about itself.  

            Take Brussels, which in many ways is Paris’s antithesis. Having similar growth patterns (albeit on different scales), it’s surprising exactly how different the city is. Where Paris is orderly and unified, Brussels spreads out in every way; Paris is expensive Brussels must be among the cheapest cities in Western Europe; Paris has enough pride for the rest of us, Brussels is extremely down to earth. As my friend David pointed out: “look at the two country’s flags– France has the big bright colors, red white and blue, while Brussels has the other end, the black orange and red (dark). The two cities really just mirror that.” And it was great to see Brussels: its attitude was a huge break from Parisian haute couture, and really helped in defining Paris’s place with the rest of Western Europe (its size, its people, its influence). Also Brussels isn’t exactly the ‘no-fun’ city travellers make it out to be (at least not for two nights), as we went to a Medieval Fair, a cheesy but amazing and cheap Irish bar, and a pub with over two-thousand beers available (Guinness-world record baby).

            What makes my two days in Brussels even better is the consideration that I spent next to no time or money to get there. Paris is one of the best situated cities in Europe to go travelling, as it gives easy access to any major city in western Europe, not to mention a number in eastern Europe. Unlike London, training or bussing around is a totally viable option– Brussels, after all, only took 4 hours on Megabus (cost me almost nothing as well, even though I booked it about eight hours before). With busses leaving from central Paris, getting places is easier than I ever could have hoped.

            Flying is a different story, and it’s where the sprawling metropolis of greater Paris becomes, well, a little irritating. Edinburgh is, of course, only accessible by plane, and of course knowing me I go for a Ryanair flight. Well, you get what you pay for. For my North American friends, Ryanair likes to think of itself as an ‘air bus’. I wouldn’t mind the fact that they play their (ad-infested) radio overhead the entire flight, or that the stewarts on board are actually travelling salesmen in disguise, or that you’re in a constant state of stress wondering if they’ll let your backpack on board, if it weren’t for the fact that the airport itself takes two hours to get to. Really? You had to put your airport out there? Beauvais is about an hour outside of Paris proper, making it not even in the greater metropolitan area. Add rush hour traffic on to that and you can give yourself three hours and still cut it close. Where the flight itself is about an hour and a half, the ordeal is closer to six. The experience was a little bizarre.

            At least Edinburgh was worth it. It’s got the kind of regality and class you don’t find in the modern world. Climbing up Arthur’s Hill, I see a stone city broken by the stretch of a hundred spires; it’s a tiny city but there could be one for every street corner. Walking along and they all choose to clamour at the same time. Or standing on a bridge and marvelling at the way the stone grows out of each other, less like a city more like the roots of a tree — the sun falling under the bridges.

            It’s nothing like Paris, except in that both cities stand alone: they seem magical because there’s nothing else like them. Edinburgh balances between its regal and ancient past with a kind of humility you’d find in a tiny English hamlet. It should be a tourist trap, and while there are tourists it somehow manages to maintain both history and integrity (none of the Disneyland fake-snow feel that York now possesses). Perhaps it’s in part because of the fantastic student life imbibed in the city center, keeping the city down to earth and intellectual at the same time. It’s the real deal, and probably the most beautiful city in the United Kingdom.

            I’m living in Paris, which really isn’t the kind of place one runs from. But places like Edinburgh (or travelling out to Fontainbleu– the king’s gardens) gives me a chance to breath (and breathing’s fun, right?). There’s far too much to see in Europe, but a weekend here and a weekend there is the place to start.