Sending up a little prayer of thanks for having survived the Parisian traffic, I swing the car into the underground parking lot at Sèvres-Babylone, stretch across the passenger seat to grab the ticket that the machine spits out, and manoeuvre gingerly into one of the narrow spaces. I sit for a moment in the sudden silence as the cooling motor ticks quietly and breathe out a big sigh of relief. As an American driving a British right-hand drive stick-shift car on the wrong side of the road (or, in fact, really the right side in every sense), I congratulate myself on having gotten this far safely, with only one near miss by a kamikaze taxi driver on the périphérique and just three aggressive blasts of the horn from French drivers sitting behind me at the stoplights a nanosecond after they turn green. Thank goodness for my GPS, whose endlessly patient and polite British tones have steered me here. Emerging into the grey light of a Paris afternoon, I pause for a moment, orienting myself.
