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Paris : Few words evoke more emotion and promise than this one. Paris, the capital of France, the northern border of the Latin spirit. Paris, where the clichés are so potent that they ultimately become the real thing. Paris—briefly challenged in the early 1990s by Prague as the world’s finest hangout for English-speakers looking for high-quality lifestyles—has never lost, and will never lose, its place in the world as the Capital of Sophistication and the Hormonal City-State of Desire. It is here that you can best contemplate what it is you want from life.

Mystery of Paris France

And that’s the irreverent message: Even in the throes of everything you think you know and believe, in Paris the ultimate mystery of existence and lower levels of surprise are always present. Being here is as much about you as it is about the city. Paris is not surreal or weird or hedonistic. It is not Amsterdam or Shanghai, nor Rio de Janeiro or Kiev. It simply is inexhaustible in its ability to charm, to seduce, to please, and to invite you to search deeper and with more intensity into everything. The café noisette or the flute of kir that you nurse on any great boulevard terrace is really defined by the time you take to do nothing, by the plans you make for the afternoon or for the next 30 years, and by the little nods you exchange with strangers too Parisian to say hello outright. For the true visitor in you, Paris is about love, about memory, about the broader history of which you and the city are both part, and, of course, the flush of delight that lives in realizing this. The rest is, well, irrelevant.

Why People go to paris

People come to Paris for all kinds of reasons. They come to hold hostage the banality of their daily lives back home. They come to compare and complain. They come to repair love that is ailing or to find love that is missing. They come to treat themselves to the guilt of calories that they usually deny themselves. They come to re-ingest the buzz of recognizing the details they discovered, the tastes they recall, and the waiter who charmed them when they visited 8 years ago as a student, or last summer with their children. The intensity of Parisian feelings multiplies on the return: There is the visit, and there is the return, the tiny thrill of reconnecting with the person you were in Paris. The person in you that you like best and can’t always be.

Paris is a tumultuous contradiction of pleasures and annoyances, and it almost seems as though one feels the power of the other.

Traffic, pollution, quick tempers, bitchiness, highmindedness taken for arrogance, a natural unwillingness to comply, and lofty prices all lock horns day and night with the unfaltering beauty of the Seine, the attractiveness of Parisian women and men, the attention the city’s residents devote to their flowers, their hair, their window displays, their shoes (but not always their sidewalks).... If you pay attention to language and dig into the collective history of words, spoken French itself becomes your mistress or lover, and the inelegant attempts of Parisians to take on the Americanness of global contemporary life absolutely lose importance. Forget the last 20 years of the 20th century when you’re in France. Just let it go. Often in denial, the real place lives elsewhere in time.