Real talk: I'm a walker

A note upfront on the distances I covered in my ten days. If someone asks me directions and I say, "Sure, it's walkable," one of my friends will be discreetly shaking their head and making 'negative', 'nope', 'just indulge her calmly' motions at the lost person behind my back, like I'm their aunt with Alzheimers. "Your definition of walkable," a friend once hissed, "Is that if you walk, and keep walking, eventually you'll get there." True. "And by that definition, everything in the freakin continental United States is walkable". Ah. Yeah. Also true. What can I tell you? I'm a walker. Trace it back to my being born in a village ten miles distant from any industry but farming, or to the lean years when I first started out as a writer and my own two feet was the only mode of transit I could afford.

So, if you know Paris at all, you will sometimes note large distances between places depicted consecutively in this journal, and assume I filled the gap with Uber, scooter, Velib, or amphibious speedboat. Nope, I walked. Rather than tell you each time about the pleasure-hell of those many thousands of steps, the sunburn, the way I kit out like an urban marine complete with criss-crossing straps and a 10-second waterproofing protocol, and the infinite audiovisual rewards of living life at the pace of my own stride... well, I'll leave you to imagine all that for yourselves.

And, with that, let's go.

Comin' atcha, Paris

Day one! I'm based in the Marais ("The quiet end," I learn to add to Parisians, who can no more imagine living in the other end than in a shoe rack at Disneyland), and bounce out onto its streets bright and early. Show me your light, City of Light! Show me your... Wait, there's no one around. I check a local clock, thinking maybe Britain changed its timezone difference to piss off Europe and no one told me. Definitely 7am on a weekday. And yet the streets are definitely dead. I will quickly learn that Paris doesn't get things started for another hour or two, and even then it's really still just thinking about it. Those pre-Paris hours in Paris fast become my favorite time of the day.