But, at sun-up, when tourists and locals alike are still asleep for at least another couple of hours, the silence allows you to channel all your sensory focus into the muted colours of sunrise, and the subsequent goosebumps down the back of your neck.
Fortunately for us, Winter is coming around much more quickly in Paris this year and sunrise isn’t until around 7:30AM (that extra half hour of sleep during Fashion Week is worth its minutes in diamonds). On the flipside, breaking it to Georgia that she was to brave the crack of dawn chill in various degrees of straplessness and sheer lace in looks more suitable to a steamier week of horse races and Birdcage marquee wars in Melbourne fast approaching, was less exciting. I, myself, had sorely underestimated how cold Paris would be in October, and by this point of suitcase living, had run out of coats to wear.
While this sleepy section of the river up the street from my apartment in the Latin Quarter was no Impressionistic Giverny, you can get enough of a sense of Monet’s Soleil Levant when you squint due East that you can allow yourself to be transported back to some pre-Internet time. Helpfully, the bridge we had initially wanted to shoot on had been transformed into a set for a period drama, complete with stressed out horses, waistcoats and monocles (though the security guards wouldn’t tell us what it was for). Meanwhile, back at the ranch, who’s going to be down at the carnival in Melbourne this year? I’ll be spending STUVAC down there studying from my hotel room around a photo project I’ve been working on.
Parisian street culture is so powerful in its collected demeanour and authenticity in contrast to, say, New York’s scattered frenzy of a thousand people trying to be a thousand things to a thousand more people.
It feeds your mind in the same capacity that an ocean swim and Chopin’s Ballades and a yoga retreat and Howard Koch can. There is so much to learn from the history entrenched in the lifestyle from very small elements like the specialisation of different food groups between charcuteries, boulangerie, and pâtisseries, to huge, mind-boggling questions like how could human beings possibly have constructed something as heartbreakingly beautiful as Palais Garnier?
Fast forward to last month in Paris with my brother for the Couture shows, and imagine my dorky déjà vu excitement that this apartment I had booked to stay in for the week sat on the same street in which I’d overzealously ambushed that poor woman all those years ago. My French didn’t come quickly enough to express this revelation to my cab driver.
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