A quick note to let you know – yes, I made it and am as happy as can be. Yes yes yes! How I love this city! How lucky I am to be here. All the misery of packing and preparing to leave is forgotten. Right now, I’m in a tiny hotel room in my old neighbourhood, the 5th arrondissement, le Quartier Latin, swooning with jet-lag after the long sleepless flight, so will mostly post pictures today. And sorry – the paragraphing is weird again, for some reason.

We landed half an hour late, at 10. A long line up to get my Navigo card and the metro into the city – we stopped for 20 minutes for a medical emergency but then were off, and I walked down the Boul. Port Royal to the hotel just as it started to drizzle, was in my room by 2. It was the strangest day here – chilly rain and hot sun alternating for five minutes at a time. First I had a delicious croque monsieur and café crème sitting outside on the Rue Mouffetard, one of my favourite streets in all Paris, and then went, on a sunny break, to visit the nearby Jardin des Plantes, a botanical masterpiece of a park with Paris’s natural history museum and a magnificent cherry tree. I scattered some of my father’s ashes beneath this tree years ago, so when I come to Paris, I visit him and thank him again for making sure I speak French and so feel comfortable in this glorious city. Anna who works with Indigenous elders approved of this, my first stop in Paris. “Paying your respects first is the preferred way to honour one’s ancestors,” she texted. Though it’s hard to imagine my vibrant father as an ancestor.