I had it all wrong...

Picture this. You're in a car, driving in a new place, and it's madness. People are weaving in and out, there are parts where you're gridlocked in place, people are honking, no one's signaling. You try your best to drive like you should. You try to be polite and let people with more intention in their driving pass you, but they zoom by without so much as a nod of the head, and you have to swerve to avoid being side swiped. You try to follow all your traffic rules, but out of nowhere someone careens by going in the wrong direction. And the harder you try to do everything right, the more people give you nasty looks.

How would you feel? Lost, confused, probably a little ticked off. And the more you drove, the more you'd long to be back where driving was normal, where people respected you, where you knew what to do. And the more you longed to be back home, the lower your mood would get. And you'd be justified, right?

Well, until you realize that you're in the bumper cars at the amusement park and not in traffic at all. Fell pretty silly, huh?

Paris isn't the place to take yourself seriously. It isn't the place to try and drive better than everyone else. It's the place to crash headlong into the person in front of you, laughing all the while.

Paris is the place to walk around with a huge smile and leave others wondering what you're so happy about. It's the place to wear high heels with your T-shirt and jeans just because you can. It's the place to listen to Frank Sinatra and the Glenn Miller Orchestra with "Going Out In Style" by the Dropkick Murphys and "Good Life" by OneRepublic thrown in for good measure.

It's hard to see all the good in something when you aren't even looking in the right direction.

-Sophia

PS, In case that whole post was a little too vague for you, I pretty much realized that Paris has a reputation as a happy-go-lucky, romantic, magical city for a reason. And that last little bit about what Paris is for is what I did last night. And now I think that the city of lights is a pretty fantastic place to be on my birthday.

PPS, That would be today, my birthday. =)