Tale of two neighborhoods

This afternoon I was back in my old neighborhood. I had to get a new ATM bank card to replace the one I misplaced 2 weeks ago. I like my bank a lot, but they've had a hard time getting all my accounts transferred from the branch in my old neighborhood to my current neighborhood, even though I formally switched branches over 5 years ago.

From 1994-1998, I lived at 2 bis, rue des Ecoles in the 5th district of Paris. I lived in a studio with a large loft as a single 1994-97, then during my first year of marriage. This is a happening neighborhood. My old apartment was 100 yards from the largest university in Paris (Pierre and Marie Curie at Jussieu) and just around the corner from le Paradis Latin club. At the other end of la Rue des Ecoles is the Sorbonne University. Former President François Mitterand had an apartment that was about 200 yards (as the crow flies) from my old place. It was close to the Seine River, the Notre Dame Cathedral, and l'Ile St. Louis.

As a single and young married man with no kids, it was a great neighborhood. It's on the very chic Left Bank (Rive Gauche). However, as an old married man with 3 kids now, I felt like I was way out of place today. If we were still in that neighborhood, we would be paying far much more rent for the same apartment that we have now. Our old neighborhood really isn't kid friendly. I don't ever recall seeing any young children in our old apartment complex. Nor any senior citizens either. In fact, we really didn't get to know anyone in the neighborhood. No one! The neighborhood is pretty much a place where college students take classes.

Our current neighborhood and apartment of the past 6 years fits us much better at this point in our lives. It's on the Right Bank (Rive Droite). There are other kids around, both in our building and in the neighborhood. We have grocery stores literally just across from our building and just around the corner. We have many parks within a 5 minute walk. It's very racially mixed. While it's no longer an easy walk to many of the touristic sites of Paris, we're close to the eastern edge of the city and even just a 20 minute ride to Charles DeGaulle Airport in a best case scenario. In our old one, it took 20 minutes just to get outside of the city.

Neighborhoods in Paris can vary extremely, even if the distance between them isn't very great. In this way, the actual distance is less important than the actual travel time. While the distance between our current neighborhood and our old one is probably only 3-4 miles as the crow flies, it feels like 20-30 miles in the U.S.

I'm thankful for my living experiences in both neighborhoods. While they are very different, they have given me different ways of looking at Paris. Both were the right neighborhood for me at that time in my life. Lots of prayer went into the apartment searches in 1994 and 2000. The Father knows best.