Recollections of Paris:
• Dogs are walked off-leash, even down busy streets. Not far from our apartment, we watched a man walking with a little dog enter a shop, turn back and look at the dog, and point to the curb, and the dog obediently walked to the curb and sat and stayed while its owner shopped.
• People were predictably annoyed to speak English with us, and they weren’t terribly friendly.
• The light and colors of the city, even in wintertime, are just gorgeous.
• The French don’t really follow rules! Which I wanna embrace, but I’m sorry, I just can’t. I need things to be open when I’ve spent hours researching when they will be open! So American.
• I love birds in cities! It’s maybe true of everywhere I went, but in Paris whenever I held my camera up to photograph something, a bird flew into the frame. It was perfect.
• Another thing that really delighted me was seeing tons of Christmas trees on the curb. For a couple days it was like a scavenger hunt, all the different kinds of disposed-of Christmas trees we would see wherever we went in the city, waiting to be picked up and taken away.

I think not only has it been too long now to accurately remember my time in Paris down to little observations like this, but things are also getting very real here in the US! Nathaniel and I kept our plans to go to Astoria for a night to celebrate his 31st birthday, but after we came home Friday evening, we’ve been pretty strictly at home. When I left work on Thursday we were canceling all events for a week, and on Friday my coworker forwarded me an email from our director that said we would be closing to the public for two weeks (I still have to report to work). I definitely felt a shift in things on Saturday morning. Life feels quiet and things feel heavy. Of course, spending so much time at home means maybe I could possibly catch up on photos?