Urban voyeurism in a café in Paris ...

I wish to return to Paris.

Paris is a millennial and unique city, it is a visual chronicle from the sidewalk of a café. Stratified by periods and each sector with its own style.

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At that time when I was in Paris, my husband and I visited it for the first time in the 90s, my husband was in Madrid for work reasons, and we went as tourists, now we are or can become emigrants. The plane, is quite a symbol, all or almost all of us have ended up in "transit" somewhere.

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A total cultural change.

At that time we visited it on several occasions, my paternal uncles, Marco and Maria, and two "maracuchos-Parisian" cousins Stephane and Matteo reside there, nowadays, my cousins are adults and each with their own Parisian family, my uncles are two elderly in the twilight of their lives.

We try to get to know the city, in a deep vital sense. Among them some of our emblematic sites in the surroundings of Notre Dame, Place Saint Michelle, Saint Jacques and the Orthodox Church of St. Julien the Poor.

The Seine and the "second-hand bookseller" and the Shakespeare Library, literary icon of the Paris of the avant-gardes at the beginning of the 20th century.

I would like to return to the Fenelon café, it is a cultural institution that in my personal history has a particular meaning for having written a good part of my memoirs there next to my husband J. R. and I, we were pedestrians illuminated by the city of lights that we knew before we met it, thanks to literature, art and history.

The Café in Paris is a cultural institution, the most emblematic are immortalized in the literature of great writers of various eras. "Watching" is an art, the human comedy, with its Vanity Fair, passes in front of our eyes, like a movie of many anonymous characters, while we were drinking coffee.

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We look without being looked at no one is interested in the anonymous parishioner or tourist, drinking coffee or reading or watching) is something like an urban voyeurism, we imagine any story, through the people who surround us or pass by.

No one is really interested in anyone, everyone in their loneliness, nostalgia, memory, reverie.

In this perspective, I don't know why, I always refer to Joyce's Ulysses and Cortazar's Hopscotch. Paris is inconceivable without its "Cafés", such as the Seine or Notre Dame or its Quartiers and Quay.

Paris is an urban plenitude, of time and space, of civilization and culture... I want to return, I dream of returning with my current maturity and experience.

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Paris becomes visible from the Medieval Chronicles and being a city jealous of its past, it never stops "fixturing" in the present-future.

In terms of history and my memories, the real thing disappears, and only the writing remains, how I loved the rhythm of life of the Bohemian and irreverent city, which made Paris a MYTH.

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Life for me, Galen, is a journey and those of us who travel live it twice.

Bonsoir Paris, je t'aime. Good evening Paris, I love you.