Home Sweet Home

Nietzsche once wrote that "only thoughts won by walking have value."
While he and I certainly have different ideas about what constitutes great thoughts, we agree on the best mode of transportation for acquiring them. Walking is by far my favourite way to experience new places. It allows me to really see and process the sights, smells, and sounds around me, and lets me really see people individually, not as dots in the blur outside the car/bus/metro window. As such, my first few days in Creteil were spent roaming around the city for hours, from the church to the centre ancien, to the Marne, to the nearby park. What I found was a wonderful mix of cultures, colors, and architecture unique to this suburb. The centre of Creteil is quite old, with the church at least dating back to the 12th century, but much of the current development came around the 1970's when the suburb was expanded with housing developments to support the booming population of immigrants. As a result, traditional French architecture mixes with modern

construction, and people from the West Indies, several countries in Africa, Asia, and Europeans mix together on the streets in a beautiful tapestry of colors and cultures. The atmosphere transitions from the busy, messy metro station to the quietly social atmosphere of the cobblestoned old city, to the peaceful rustle of leaves and families walking their pets by the Marne. While it has had its ups and downs, I've found myself falling in love with the smiling faces and slower pace of this suburb full of pedestrians, a peace apart from the pulse of Paris and the metro system.