On the eve of my birthday this year, I have the enviable pleasure of calling home my own, small-but-very-cosy 4th floor Paris apartment in the multicultural working-class district of La Goutte d’Or. From the two, tall Haussmann-era windows beside my desk I can almost reach out and touch the dome of the Sacre Coeur, standing like a lighthouse of Montmartre as it reflects a solitary presence against the black, starless night. I know that it’s the last light to go out each night when the arrondissements are asleep and dreaming. If I brush aside the curtain and put my finger on the window pane, but not for too long, I can feel the piercing chill of December flooding my dim, lamplit street as it washes away the last of the engines and echoes. Except I’m interrupted by the sound of a dog’s bark quickly followed by the mutters of its self-conscious owner. Both incomprehensible and in French of course because it’s rude to interrupt any Parisian in english.

I have inherited a double-bed studio doubling as a library of literature, brimming with books above the bed and in the bathroom, thanks to a sociology-thesis student, Remi, who coincidentally left for Morocco and Senegal the day before I came back from five days in Marrakech. To my absolute delight there is an amplifier and two speakers with a shelf of music, not to mention the books I know I won’t get through in my six weeks here which I already don’t want to end. Across the hall from me lives a mother of four and just last night she gave me some tins of Mexican bean salad. Her school-age children are friendly and we always exchange bonjours on the creaky, wooden spiral staircase. In the mornings I’m either woken by the sound of church bells or children playing in the several schools and kindergartens around the corner. My daily round-trip walk to the Barbes metro gives me flashbacks of returning to our riad again as I pass by the now-familiar African and Middle-eastern cous cous, kebab and tagine shops. My favourite of all has to be the elderly man on my street who sells nothing but tied bundles of fresh mint which are stacked on the tables of his tiny corner shop all day and night!

If you know me then by now you already knew that I fell in love with this village of a city before I ever set foot on the Eiffel Tower let alone kicked the tires of a trolley-wielding grandma at the weekly markets – pardon! As a visitor of the 21st-century, and being exactly 23 today, I wouldn’t call Paris the “city of lights”, and with reason since the Sacre Coeur is now invisible but for a faint spot that could easily be mistaken for a bedside lamp, or the annoying ritual of being ushered home by the 1am metro curfew. Paris is traditional like a crusty, melt in your mouth baguette traditionelle, which one soon discovers are not all baked equally by some 1,263 boulangeries in the city, and one which I’ve started crossing town for. However, all French wine is very good and cheaply available for 2 euros from any Monoprix. Paris is safe such that you are more likely to find a jogger on the streets at 3am. It seems that the French would genuinely prefer to strike, protest or riot collectively than direct their anger at a complete stranger. That would just be rude and the French have impeccable manners. Paris is so incredible and unreal that everything sounds plausible. Who else would dare to put a larger-than-life condom on Ramses II’s Obelisk? Even the cafe Les Deux Moulins has its own real-life Amelie look-alike. Paris is a contradiction with its grand boulevards hiding intimate streets and romantic park benches in all the right places. Paris is fashionably late and avant-garde but befuddled by irreverent laws dictating that Museums must close on Mondays, but allow free entry every second Sunday of the month. You get the idea. Thankfully the metro is efficient and reliable where I still find myself daydreaming at each station of stepping onto the next train back to the Belle Époque.

Tonight, I understand what Hemingway meant when he wrote to a friend, “if you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” Tomorrow, I’ll be repaying a favour to a new friend from London and sharing my little pied-à-terre with him and three Lithuanian girls for the next few days. C’est la vie.