getting to know you

i am slowly starting to find a shared wave length with paris. i'm not saying i am fully settled in as it still feels a bit foreign, and it certainly doesn't help that my french is very limited; i have come to notice that there is no way i can stay here and feel comfortable if i don't learn the language a bit more. this is not a problem for me in the sense that i like learning (languages), and i fully intend to do so in the case of french as well; but i reckon it might take a bit as, well, it is a mad language.

but that's ok, let's consider it a challenge.

but the thing that makes me start to feel a bit like home is that i have favourites, pet peeves as well as routines. i know the latter sounds terribly dull, but i am the kind of person who needs some kind of structure, otherwise i end up wasting the day and feeling like poop in the evening because i got nothing done. now i know that the reason i came into paris in the first place was to take a bit of time off and distance myself from nine to five so as to give space for other things to happen; but still, i like to have a framework on which i can then build my day. at the moment i have a strong idea as of how this structure should be and on many days it even fulfills itself, so i am half way there.

when it comes to issues of annoyance, the main thing that bothers me is the distance between the place you happen to be at and basically everywhere else. you have to keep in mind that i hail from helsinki, have lived in budapest and prague - all places that are relatively compact. compared to those paris is so huge, so out of control; and sometimes the arduousness of getting from one place to another gets to me. but i reckon in the end this is mainly a question of getting used to; the only thing is that you kind of have to want to get used to it, as in the positives have to outdo the negatives in the grander scale of things.

as for favourites - i know it's early in the sense that i haven't been here so long, which equals to the fact that i don't have so many things to choose the favourite from, but you have to start from somewhere, right? so far the most important one - and this is a combination of favourite and routine - is the paris i get to experience in the mornings. every day due to running but more importantly i have taken up the habit of going out once a week very early to photograph the city when it is empty; and i have to say that walking on the empty streets of one of the most visited cities in the world is quite beautiful an experience.

before i moved here i honestly can't say that paris would have been among my favourite cities; in fact, having visited a few times before, i mainly found it overrated and a slight disappointment. but now, after some time, i can as honestly say that it is growing on me; i guess the place it will eventually reach in my heart remains to be seen.