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Just a year before I had stood in exactly the same spot on Boulevard de Clichy in Paris. I could not deny that Paris felt exactly as the movies said it should. I was stood right outside the Moulin Rouge on the same road as the café that Van Gough and his contemporaries had regularly gathered. Earlier I had walked past a house he had lived in and a pink brothel where he may or may not have caught syphilis. I snapped shots of the café where Amelie learnt many life lessons. I stared up at the Sacré-Cœur and fell in love with the view and later that night I looked down from outside of the Sacré-Cœur under a full moon and fell in love with the city all over again. Walking around Montmartre felt like I was in a perfectly quaint movie. That weekend I tried escargot and drank whisky at an underground jazz jam session. The Ethel tower lit up over me as I sat on a boat drifting along the River Seine. I couldn’t deny that the cliché of Paris being the most romantic city in the world was a bit more than a cliché. Paris was truly magical. A year later at the height of one of Europe’s hottest summers I travelled to Paris again. There were whispers of police using force on crowds that had gathered in the city centre to celebrate the win of the world cup. The atmosphere was both celebratory and a little edgy but mostly people seemed to be enjoying the long days and warm nights. We met our tour guide Kevi founder of Le Paris Noir outside the Moulin Rouge joined by about 20 other tourist mostly African American that had travelled to Paris for Afro Punk 2018. Le Paris Noir is a company that offer black history walking tours. I hoped to learn about black Paris from the point of view of the history of the African diaspora who are settled in France now particularly those who descended from the French colonies. The tour understandably catered to the majority of the group that day and focused on African American history In Paris. We learnt of Josephine Baker an African American dancer who rose to fame in France in the 1920s. She later went onto collect intel for France during the second world war and took in orphans from different ethnic backgrounds to prove that different ethnicities could live side by side. We learnt that at that time black Americans felt freer in Paris than they did in America so some of them came to Paris and stayed a while. It rang in the same romantic tone as the stories of Van Gough and his contemporaries. But these stories felt more hidden like a secret you will only find if you were looking for it. This rang true as we turned right at the foot of the hill that led to Sacre-Coeur. This took us into a neighbourhood with a sea of black and brown faces. An area that hadn’t come up in my walking tours the year before. Our tour guide led us to a market that I had never been to before but that felt strangely familiar. It is the place that we gather across the globe to remember who we are. To sell, to barter to gossip, where children trudge along reluctantly not knowing that these sounds and smells will guide them home in their later years. That words of wisdom whispered in these spaces would follow them forever and the archetypes of the characters that lived in these spaces would teach them how to love, laugh and find home wherever they go. The owner of the clothing store Sape and co shared with us his own words of wisdom before we left to slot back into our roles as tourist for the weekend. He said ‘every day you have to own your elegance because you don’t own tomorrow.’ I saw his words reflected in all of the amazing outfits at the Afro Punk festival that year which felt a like the market all over again but with a millennial twist.