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My Scholarship entry - A 'place' I have visited

France | Tuesday, June 25, 2013 | 6 photos

A few years ago, I visited Paris for my birthday. Paris for me had always been the epitome of culture and style. Like everyone else my age, I had idolized it, but when I arrived I found myself feeling quite different than I had ever felt before. Paris had given me a new understanding of the world. Some places that one travels to feel attainable. Almost like you could take a piece of where you've visited back with you and have the trip "all figured out," but I didn't feel that way about Paris. And I began to understand that I may never feel that way about any place that I would visit again, because I began to grasp how important it was to be present where I was. How easily it was to miss the tiny details of a every day life. I began to fall in love in the difference in the smallest of things. In the tag sizes, in the signs. I fell in love with travel on that trip and it was the first time in a very long time that I had remembered what it felt like to be a kid. What it felt like to wander and be in awe of things that had come before me and things that were happening right in front of me. And I felt blessed that I had my camera with me and I haven't put it down since.