Paris for me will always be a city for writers, artists, lovers, dreamers, wandering souls.
When I think of Paris, I think of Hemingway.
Like he wrote at the beginning of A Moveable Feast, the only book that I try to reread every year, “Then there was the bad weather.” The opening, really, was his preamble to Café des Amateurs, “the cesspool of the rue Mouffetard,” and the smells of the toilets in the changing seasons.
In my case, the weather is merde.
Flights are cancelled in and out of Charles de Gaulle Airport. Paris is buried in snow, cut off from the suburbs and the rest of the world. It is a city fending for itself for the weekend. Paris is unapologetic about its weather. C’est la vie. Deal with it.
Hemingway wasn’t the first writer to love Paris, but to my mind he loved it best. He articulated it in the way Van Gogh did of Provence on his canvas. They would both die by suicide elsewhere—but in Paris they were happy.
This is Paris, after all, a city that is still so perfectly beautiful even under a heavy blanket of snow that falls from the sky and settles with resignation on the ground. The city that moved Nietzsche to say, “An artist has no home in Europe except Paris.” This is Paris awash in a strange green color by Amelie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, in a golden hue by Woody Allen in Midnight in Paris.
Even in the miserable cold of this winter day in January some years ago, Paris has me putting her back on top of my list of favorite cities in the world, after a brief dalliance with Berlin and a longer one with Istanbul.
Like many writers, I think of Paris through a hopeful Hemingway and his band of depressed alcoholics, all creative misfits. He was 22, he lived in Paris with his wife Hadley Richardson for seven years as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star.




He drank in Paris, cavorted with fellow expats, and got friendly with what Gertrude Stein called “The Lost Generation.” In the City of Light, these were the stars that shone bright: the writers James Joyce, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the artists Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró.
Hemingway’s time in Paris, starting in 1921, inspired his early works. In the apartment he shared with his wife at 74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine, he wrote The Sun Also Rises. The area was known as the Latin Quarter, where his house was modest, his stairs creaked, and their life was frugal—but they were happy.
Thirty-six years before, in 1886, Van Gogh also moved to Paris and lived with his brother Theo in an apartment at 54 Rue Lepic in Montmartre to save money. In the neighborhood known for its artistic community and bohemian vibe, Van Gogh loved Paris too.


Van Gogh’s period in Montmartre was of manic artistic creativity and exploration, which experts say laid the foundation of his art. He was happy to be with his brother Theo in Paris but it was Provence, in Arles, that gave him the most inspiration. And in turn, the South of France gave the world his most beautiful paintings.
Hemingway wasn’t the first writer to love Paris, but to my mind he loved it best. He articulated it in the way Van Gogh did of Provence on his canvas: with such tenderness and affection.
They would both die by suicide elsewhere—but in Paris they were happy.
The Paris I love


Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago. He is often quoted—or accused of saying, “Oak Park is a neighborhood of wide lawns and narrow minds.”
But of Paris, he wrote in his memoir, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”
He had such affection for Paris that it continued to shape and influence his writing long after he left in 1928—with a new wife, Pauline Pfeiffer. The year before, he divorced Hadley after she discovered his affair.
I realize, of course, that there exist two sides of Paris: one for those who live here, and another for those who visit. One for whom the French are an absolute nightmare, and another for whom they are darlings when you talk to them in your bad tourist French.
For all the times that I have visited Paris, I literally followed the footsteps of the writers I worshipped as they walked all over the city in their lifetimes, and were kind enough to write these down for us to plot. You always remember the first time you visit Paris like you remember your first kiss. I always go back to when the smell of baguettes brought inexplicable happiness to me, or that first time at the Louvre seeing the Mona Lisa, or the first time I walked on the Left Bank.
That district of the Opera House has always amused me. The center of the culturati and the glitterati is a short walk to the red light district and its supermarket-like sex shops. I’ve always wondered if this was by design or happenstance.


Paris for me will always be a city for writers, lovers, artists, wandering souls. You don’t need anyone to enjoy Paris, it’s a city for solo travelers.
The arrondissement (district) that most tourists gravitate to is the 8th which has inarguably the most beautiful avenue in the world, Champs Elysées, with its wide footpaths and horse-chestnut trees (without leaves in winter but still a breathtaking sight).
Champs Elysées is Paris’s busiest avenue or as a tour guide described it, “12 roads and a circle in the middle.” The 50/50 rule is observed here. Since so many cars get rear-ended around Arc de Triomphe, the city simply imposed a rule that splits liability and fault 50/50.
A moveable feast




When I think of Paris, I think of Hemingway.
Hemingway was the embodiment of an aggressive white male, whether in the way he treated his women or the way he loved bullfighting. The sport was central in some of his books like The Sun Also Rises, Death in the Afternoon and the anthology Short Stories.
He wrote in The Dangerous Summer, “Anything capable of arousing passion and interest in an audience is worthy of being presented in dramatic form. That’s why I chose bullfighting.”
I’ve visited Paris more than a dozen times. The last time was on my birthday in 2018, a World Cup year that was hosted by Russia. I was in Paris when the French won the semifinal game against Belgium—and the city just went crazy.
The Eiffel Tower was lit in bleu, blanc et rouge, people were drinking on the Left and Right Banks of the Seine, from Trocadero all the way to Champs Elysées, and you could hear the car horns all over the city. By the time they won the final game against Croatia, I was in East Central France where the celebration was the same but with fewer, less crazy people.


In 2014, I would visit Paris twice. The first is with good friends with whom I went on a road trip through Provence.
We land in Paris in July to news that Russia had shot down a commercial flight over Ukraine. We had taken the same airline and friends urge us to change our flight back to Manila. A week later, when they are leaving for Manila and I am flying to Prague, another plane from a different airline would crash in Algeria.
The second is over the Christmas holidays. I fly to Paris with my laptop and my external hard drive. In Manila a few days before, I had decided to launch a travel blog on Jan. 1, 2015.
Even I have changed from when I was here first, when Paris threw stardust in my eyes that I have never really been able to wipe away—or wanted to.
Like I told friends after: never start a personal project when you are about to go on vacation because it will consume you. Paris is this city outside the flat I’m renting in Bastille where I am writing like crazy. I write in cafes and drink wine until my fingers are frozen from the winter chill. As I walk along Champs Elysées and Christmas markets, I can’t wait to get back to the flat because I’ve suddenly remembered some things from past travels.
For the first time, writing gets in the way of Paris and me.
It feels like I have wasted my time with Paris. I could have very well been writing in Manila, I say even though I really don’t believe it. My friend Marta, a Polish girl married to a Filipino diplomat friend, puts things in perspective. She says, “Maybe you wouldn’t have written as much as you did if you weren’t in Paris.”
She is right, of course.


I realize that there exist two sides of Paris: one for those who live here, and another for those who visit. One for whom the French are an absolute nightmare, and another for whom they are darlings when you talk to them in your bad tourist French.
I know this is the Paris that I love, the city that melts my heart like no other. The same Paris that Hemingway did before so many others like me, the Paris whose skyline hasn’t changed much even as its people and immigrants did.
Even I have changed from when I was here first, when Paris threw stardust in my eyes that I have never really been able to wipe away—or wanted to. It is the same Paris even as I am older, a little wiser, not much richer because of all my travels.
Unavoidably, still a writer.
When I think of Hemingway


I think of him as the 17-year-old boy who started his writing career in a Kansas City newspaper. I think of him as the 22-year-old author in Paris, having survived a mortar shell in the Italian front when he was 18 and driving an ambulance during the First World War.
I think of how he cheated on his wives—many times flagrantly—as if wanting to witness in front of his eyes the breaking of a heart for his own pleasure.
I think of the Nobel Prize he received at 55 for his “powerful, style-forming mastery of the art of modern narration.” He didn’t attend the awards ceremony, but he sent his speech, part of which read, “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.”
I think of his house in Key West, Florida that I visited in my late twenties. I think of his house in Idaho that he shared with his fourth wife Mary. On a June morning in 1961 in this last house, he took his shotgun and put the end of the barrel inside his mouth and pulled the trigger. He was 61.
When I think of Hemingway, I think of Paris. He was very happy here.
(Some parts of this story first appeared in an essay on the author’s travel blog. )