City that Sets the Mood

Like I had mentioned, in all the five weeks I’ve been in Paris, I had not settled on calling it the City of Lights. I will give merit to the claim that it is the City of Love, but I even find that lacking in its true identity.

Cuddling up on the freezing boat tour.

Love can be anything: love of your boyfriend, love of your mother, of your dog, of your estranged cousin, of jump-roping. The extent of the way the emotion can be distributed is definitely what people overlook. In this city, one can certainly make claims that there is a lot of love: love of fashion, love of fitness, love of PDA.

For me, the last one is very apparent. Combine that with the sparkling Eiffel Tower and risqué lingerie billboards and you have a City That Sets the Mood.

Or maybe they're so skinny due
to the amount of stairs they climb daily.

This has been so apparent in everything I have learned about the French culture. I had recently even stumbled upon a tweet reading something to effect of “Leave it to France to make Weight Watchers Sexy” referring to a commercial that doesn't even reveal any type of human form other than the mouth. On the same page as weight loss, I read that it was suggested they are so skinny because they are more sexually active than the average American.

Or maybe they just don’t consider McDonald’s an aphrodisiac like we do?

I digress.

Paris is sexy. And not to say that I shield my eyes in the steamy scene in 300 like my young brother just looking to get his adrenaline pumping through the following scenes of violence, but Parisians don’t consider affection as a sacred thing. Metro stations, cafes, airplanes; no place is a bad place to swap spit.

David's aptly named
The Love of Helen and Paris.

Even in the 17th century, from the inside view and out, one can see the fascination. French painters like David and Delacroix painted naked women all too frequently. Just because you call her an allegory doesn’t mean you’re not trying to get a rise out of what my professor would call the “heterosexual male audience.”

Aside from the overly apparent appreciation for partnership, It is kind of a beautiful thing. Because of the prevalence of love in every day life, no one stops showing it, from teenagers to old geezers.
I’ve never seen so many enamored grandparents concentrated in one area.

It kind of proves to me, as an American, that being in love is not as difficult as we tend to make it out to be. The problem with us in America is we are so caught up in life that we forget. We think that we need to go out on dates and honor tradition of what everyone defines love as.

Love for Jim Morrison.

The reason Paris has it down to an art is because they make it the main event. The main event is not a fancy house, because the entire population of the city, save for the president, lives in apartments. The main event is not the car ride; they hold hands and walk to the Metro together.

Okay, I do absolutely skeeve hearing people making out in the seat behind me. But there are more delicate ways of doing this.

The point is, I’ve come to love Valentine’s Day in commemoration of Al Capone’s assassination of Bugs Moran’s men.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. That moment will forever be in my heart when February 14th comes around.

But people of Paris are so in love with each other that they let it all hang out every single day, not just one day of the year when Godiva makes a killing and Tiffany’s is working overtime.

This Valentine’s Day, the eve of my departure of the City that Sets the Mood, I will let wine know just how much I love it, and remember the Parisian celebration of love every other day of the year.