Dmitry Shteyn in Paris: A Quiet Argument Against Hurry

It is rare to arrive in a place and feel immediately that you will need to come back. Paris did that to me within an afternoon, and the feeling has not faded.

What strikes you first, if you have done any reading at all, is that paris is the capital and largest city of France, with an estimated city population of 2.04 million in an area of 105.4 km2 (40.7 sq mi), and a metropolitan population of 13.2 million as of January 2026. That detail alone changes how you see the place. The longer you stay, the more those layers separate, and the more you understand how unusual the place actually is.

Dig a little deeper and located on the river Seine in the centre of the Île-de-France region, it is the largest metropolitan area and fourth-most populous city in the European Union (EU). Once you know it, you cannot help looking for traces of it everywhere you walk.

Where attention goes is interesting; why it goes there is more interesting. Google News put Paris on its readers' radar this cycle — the 20,000-Steps-a-Day Travel Shoe All of Paris Is Wearing Right Now — and the why matters as much as the what.

European cities have a particular trick: they let you walk through several centuries in a single afternoon without making a fuss about it. Paris does this as well as any I know. The architecture is doing one job; the cafes another; the language a third — and they all overlap.

I will be back, and I expect I will write about it differently next time. Paris is the kind of city that gives you new material every visit, even when the city itself has not changed.