I found one of the best ways to see a culture is one of three places – a market, a library or a park, and Paris is no different. Me and Rachael have been on the lookout for the beautiful classical architecture marvel of Bibliothèque Nationale de France. It’s a beautiful building whose origins can be traced as far back as 1368! Now I’m no math genius but that’s a really long time ago compared to most libraries in Canada.

As me and Rachael were wandering around the beautiful side streets of Paris looking for this, we slowly start to notice there are more trendy cafés and university students. Some of them even with the funny moustaches; it’s interesting to think that there are hipsters all over the world… Anyway, we’re slowly getting closer and closer to our area, we quickly do a search on Google and find we’re only a couple of blocks away. We are both incredibly surprised and quite happy and ready to go. Hand in hand we walk along a huge granite wall and eventually you see the arrow that says “entrance” to Bibliothèque Nationale de France. We see a small archway where we walk through under the shade of the archway, seeing half-naked women statues on either side of the it holding books and scrolls. I was wonder what the fascination in French culture is with half-naked women. It is actually quite beautiful but it is quite different to see how cultures react differently to nudity, at least that’s what I’m thinking as we were walking by. Eventually we make it to the front door where eager university students are walking to and from the library with books and laptops. I excitedly walk the stairs with Rachael thinking how lucky I am to be travelling the world! 

We open the door; it swings and glides very easily. A cool breeze passes us as we start walking towards the front door and all of a sudden a security guard stops us and tells us the only way that we can get in is if we are university students. My heart drops down through my stomach and in my broken French I tell him I’m sorry but we’re not students but we would really love to see the library. He says the only thing we can do is step into that little alcove to look. I sadly shook my head and told Rachael, she shrugged her shoulders and says well at least we can look at it. So we take a couple of steps and enter the room.  It’s still hard to describe what I saw to this day: there’s so many people reading and studying. The room itself seems like the type of place you would see an old man smoking beautiful cigars. The walls are plastered with beautiful artwork and the rows of wooden tables look like pews in a church. I would give anything just to be able to walk through, sit down and just read. Sadly we are not lucky enough to have that as an experience so we just stand there and look, holding hands and pondering how lucky we are to be in France.

Eventually we realize there’s nothing we can do so we walked back out. A small part of me was left in the library. Sometimes in life you don’t get what you want but you get what you need and there are many other libraries in my life that I want to see. I’m happy I can cross this off my bucket list. I hope you guys get a chance to cross things off your bucket list like this. Thank you so much for reading this quick post and I hope you guys have a wonderful day.