Bed in Shakespeare & Co, a little-but-incredible expat bookstore on the South Bank in Paris. They stock new & used books in a plethora of languages, have some lovely kitties, and house travelling writers for free - just as long as you'll work in the store three hours a day. It's my kind of bohemian heaven.

Gods but I love this bookstore. Not only for it’s charms, but for the memories that come with it - that was the best night of our France trip (aside from maaaaybe the night we went bowling in Avignon, all of us together, French and Canadian, and we all sucked except for the fourteen-year-old little brother of my exchange partner, and nobody knew what size shoe we needed, and we all tumbled together onto benches meant for far fewer people and laughed and drank and held hands.), the six of us seperating from the main group and wandering the South Bank late at night, hopelessly lost until we decided to follow a cat and finally, finally ended up outside of this little green-and-yellow shop. We spent hours browsing, because Shakespeare & Co. doesn’t close ‘til midnight, and met a Norwegian photojournalist who’d spent twelve hours there for a piece he was working on, and the lovely people who were living there at the time, and then we made our purchases and started wandering back through the wide, dark (but still so well-lit!) streets, and once we got back to our hotel we climbed through the window one of the boys had dismantled for us, and sat on the roof and read Ginsberg and Kafka and… Milton, I think is what we bought for our literature teacher, late into the morning.

…And maybe, the real highlight of that France trip is the evening that the father of my host family, after my awkward attempt to make conversation over dinner, responded “I do not like Jimi ‘endrix. I love Jimi ‘endrix!” and proceeded to take me into the sitting room and play me a bunch of his rare Hendrix bootlegs on vinyl, and we stayed there for hours talking about music. (He later gave me a CD of a bunch of the Hendrix recordings before I left for Paris - I lost it somewhere, and I regret it every time I think about it.) Or maybe it was the time I didn’t really want to eat the veal my host family served me, and they thought I didn’t know what it was, so they kept saying things like “cow” and “meat” and finally the previously mentioned fourteen-year-old went “mooooooooooo” and we all cracked up. Or maybe it was their simple kindness in general, or the apricot orchard they lived next to, or the day they took me to a traditional spring festival in the next town over. Maybe it was looking down on Paris from the top of the Eiffel tower, or the markets in Aix-en-Provence, or the sheer beauty of Fontaine de Vaucluse, or maybe it was the easy camraderie we built up on our long bus trips, discussing Rage Against the Machine or singing K-OS or whatever else we did.

Maybe it was all of these things.

This isn’t what I originally intended to write with this photo - I just wanted to say that I loved Shakespeare & Co., and I can’t wait to go back to it and Paris (hopefully soon.) That France trip is what fueled my hunger for travel, and I’ll always be so glad I went on it. And, while I hunger to rediscover places that I’ve visited and loved, I’m just as eager to visit new places. London is an incredible city, and I really do love it here, but moving somewhere is not the same thing as travelling; they both shape you, help you grow, but one is so much more fun than the other. More tiring, too, and difficult, and it can be lonely. But the sheer wonder of all these places that are waiting to be seen is so much stronger to me than any melancholy or potential bed bugs.