76 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs

This was my address when I lived in my favorite city in the world - Paris. Right at the bottom of the 6th arrondissement, between the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Jardin de Luxembourg, a five-minute walk from the formidable, if not exactly beautiful, Tour Montparnasse. Closest to the Vavin metro stop, but also convenient to Edgar Quinet. With a view of the roof of the Sorbonne from my eighth-floor one-room garret apartment. Bliss.

For the four and a half months I lived in Paris, I was completely euphoric. When we first arrived I learned that our semi-psychotic housing 'director' had taken my request to live a) with a family, b) within walking distance of our school, and c) in the middle of the city and thrown it out like last weeks compost. I was with a single, middle aged woman, on the outskirts of the city, a 30-minute metro ride to class. The only friend I had on the program? On the complete opposite side of the city. We could not have been farther apart. So, I took matters into my own hands. I found an ad for a room for rent, called the woman, met her, and rented it.

My new host mother, Francoise, was an English teacher with two children around my age, both off at college. She lived in an absolutely beautiful apartment that had been in her family for years, and came complete with maids quarters on the top floor. This is where I was in luck - her son had been living in the maids quarters, but was going off to school, therefore she was looking to rent it out. She showed me the room. rectangular, not very large, with a built in shower stall, sink, and mirror. (The toilet, shared by the 10 or so people that lived there, was in the hall. No worries, it was spotlessly clean.) There was a door/window that opened onto a sweet little balcony. A desk, dresser, nightstand, and hot plate completed the ensemble, and the price was right. I moved in the next day.

I quickly became one with my new neighborhood. I went to the bakery around the corner every day. "Bonjour madame!" I would greet her cheerfully. "Bonjour!" She would smile back. The deceptively small but delicious restaurant down the street began to recognize me, and at one point asked a classmate where I was when she came in without me. The discovery of a bagel shop that served different bagel sandwiches named after cities in the United States brought me closer to my adopted home. The surly waiters at the restaurant we went to for steak frites gradually loosened up and began to joke with us. We had cracked the snail's shell, and I melted into my Parisian life like Nutella in a curbside crepe.

Living in Paris had been my childhood dream - I started learning French in kindergarten and never looked back. The city calls to me, those four and a half months remain vivid in my memory in a way my trips to China and Brazil have not. A map of the City of Lights hangs above my bed, where I can almost see myself walking its streets. I can smell the air, feel the breeze, recall the exact hue of the sunlight on the Haussmannien buildings and luxurious boulevards. I'm not saying Paris is perfect, I'm just saying it's where I belong.