Why Paris?

The first question I want to ask myself is why Paris?

I LOVE cities!

Growing up on the backroads in Sebastopol, CA I barely knew anything about cities. I was very familiar with horses, haunted houses, berries and apples, and reading by candlelight during power outages. The cities I became familiar with as a young girl were San Francisco, Los Angeles, and NYC. All for very different reasons.

San Francisco was a place that was relatively close by where there would be trips to the aquarium, the zoo, Fisherman’s wharf, and later raves. Los Angeles was where my dad lived and it was so vast I didn’t even conceive of it as a city, it was more like one giant freeway. We were always in the car, listening to Jazz. New York City was in the books I loved, like Stuart Little and the Cricket in TImes Square. There was the lake in a magical place called Central Park, magazine and newspaper stands outside of subway stations, shops in an area called Chinatown that sold wooden cages for crickets. Cities were distant and mainly existed in my imagination.