Parisian delight is just a flight away

Paris

Parisian delight is just a flight away

Wait! Don’t start yet! Put some –appropriate- music on first!

Sometimes I feel that there are no sufficient words to describe how I feel when I’m in Greece for a long period and I haven’t been lost into the Parisian alleys, gazing around me to “gather” as much Parisian beauty as I can, like it’s the first time. And when I stand in the buildings’ crevices, -that Haussmann beautifully reconstructed-, from where a few rays of sun spread and I close my eyes to gather warmth, I think the time has come for me to return to Greece. When you live abroad, you feel forever half. A part of you is in the country you were born and grew up, and another in the country that “matured” you even if it is years away from your real adulthood.

My own heart cities are just 3 hours and a half away. So close, yet they seem so far away some days. They are those days that I inhale pending to do lists, bills and deadlines. My mind tries to leave mentally, pulling my hand vigorously. And from the blue of the sky that has flooded my mind, I jump on a magical blue page on the screen of my laptop, where airplanes hang around until I decide my destination. And just like that I am (again) in Paris.

I have a relationship of love and hate with Paris, just as I have with Athens. Maybe because I have lived its bad, but also its beauty. Neither city is perfect, as though a tourist brochure extols or a tourist who only saw the charming sides. Even though, mostly by conscious choice, I like to focus on the good around me so as to be filled with beauty, I know every blemish, any defect of the city of light, but maybe that’s why I love it so much, because it has imperfections like me, like you, like all of us.

Every person has a habit – lifeline. Something that he does to change the mode inside him from anxious to loose, from sullen to cheery. My lifeline is walks in beautiful places, with headphones in my ears playing my favorite music and my camera to “capture” the beauty. Could the beauty be captured? Undoubtedly not, but every time I look at these pictures, the feeling of looseness and joy returns, as if I captured the feelings, the perfumes, the colors. I inhale beauty, architecture that enchants, Parisian cafes that seem to have sprung from a film frame, streets that seem to lead to infinity of a better world and I breathe out deadlines, pressure, anything that drives away the magic, which as children we thought there was really there and later when we grew up we learned to make it for ourselves. Occasionally we still believe that exists…