The First

I decided to start this blog not on my first day in Paris -- which was, as some of you know, about a week ago -- but on my first day alone in Paris.

I sit at my computer now in my own apartment... my first apartment. It doesn't have a view; it doesn't have a kitchen, and the W.C. is in the hallway, but it's absolutely fantastic! (Except for the whole seventh floor part. Lugging two suitcases -- one closer to 100 pounds than I would have liked -- up seven flights of stairs is definitely not my favorite aspect of the city. But it's part of a story -- my story, as unique as the battle scars of a hundred pounds up eighteen stairs seven times in a single afternoon, and the smell of a Parisian Metro station.

And this chapter starts in Paris, in the Seventh Arrondissement... the Seventh Ward.