PASTRIES FOR BREAKFAST: A SHORT STAY IN PARIS

After completing our masters degrees’ my friend Albina and I traveled to Paris for a celebratory four day trip. As first time visitors to Paris, we found that the city was everything we imagined it to be, the streets appeared like in a vintage movie and from many angels of the city parts of the Eiffel tower could be seen, just as if it were leaning over Paris.

We stayed in a flat in the outskirts of Paris in an area called Daumesnil. Staying in the outskirts of Paris was great, it meant that the area wasn’t always so busy or expensive as when we were in the center. There was an amazing place to eat pastries in the morning on the same street as the flat, it had delicious, fresh pastries. We filled ourselves up with éclaires, tarts and croissants and a coffee before getting on the tram and walking all around Paris.

I was very excited to visit Canal Saint-Martin, featured in Amélie, one of my favourite movies. In the scene she skips stones along the canal and the stones bounce along and create ripples in the water. The bridge and the canal looked almost exactly the same as in the movie. I could really appreciate how the movie brought together the character of Amelie and her life in Paris as a young woman. I liked how the movie created an pastiche of Paris through several shots of Amelie’s past times in a Paris ‘lived in’ by the heroine. In the movie ‘Parisian style’ is shown as something innate, not in fashion or the glamour of Paris but in the arbitrary act of throwing a stone into a body of water and drawing excitement from it moving skillfully in perfect successions across the surface.