Sabrina in Paris

Up until my trip to Paris, I had never been to Europe. I will never forget the feeling I had lifting up the airplane shades and seeing, for the first time ever, the landscape of France below.

But before that, a little backstory. At a certain point in my life, I think I stopped feeling like things felt “new.” Being in my mid/late 30s, (I’m tired and feel so old most of the time) it had been a while since something sincerely surprised me. I’ve always believed (probably to my own detriment) that even if I have never experienced it myself, I can still visualize something or someone and get a good sense of what it would taste like, feel like, look like, or be like. But opening up those shades, I felt my eyes seeing something that was a first, something that was completely original. Finally, what I was experiencing, for the first time in a long time, was something beautifully new.

After Covid, my enthusiasm for travel really decreased. Life became uncertain overnight, and my focus became survival and wondering if my job would be safe or not. There was so much change happening within my own little bubble that thinking of expanding out and traveling was very low on my list of priorities. I don’t think I realized I never fully snapped out of that, until late one night, my best friend and I were lamenting that Sabrina Carpenter’s concert was completely sold out in LA, and resale was extremely expensive. Jokingly, we said, why don’t we travel for it and find tickets in a country where it wasn’t sold out, and it wasn’t a million dollars. Again, jokingly- until I received this text from her:

And there it was, signed, sealed, and delivered. We were going to Sabrina Carpenter in Paris; that’s what was going to get me to go to Europe for the first time in my life. Sabrina in Paris was what would bring me out of my travel hiatus and reignite a spark of travel again. And little did I know, once I got there, everything else that happened to come with that just ended up being the most delightful, unexpected, and the new surprise I had been waiting for. How lucky!