Let me jump directly to the point where we think we are about to die: I am sitting in the Café de l’Industrie near Bastille with A., the cousin-once-removed I have never met before, when I turn to the windows and see people streaming by. “Oh,” I say. It’s the Rollerbladers, I think, because it is Paris, and it is Sunday night, and there always seem to be parades of Rollerbladers Rollerblading down the street on Sunday evening. (This is important, that it is Sunday, November 15, and not Friday, November 13, two nights earlier, when terrorists murdered more than 100 people, three blocks from my apartment.) “Oh,” I say, turning, even as I’m realizing that they are not Rollerblading but running — but from what? From something. Is it happening again? I am turning toward A. but also, now, realizing that everyone in the café — which is packed, not a seat to be had — is up and then down and then on the floor. A., somehow, is under the bench, on which I am …

I was eating a burrito and wondering if anyone else had noticed that the Best Picture nominees were the stories of, like, a half-dozen white guys and Martin Luther King (at least we know where the bar is set for the non-white guy portion of the population) when I came across this story: Apparently guys are less interested in confident ladies. And it got me thinking. Typically I might not have much to add to this particular discussion—except for the fact that I recently took a deep dive, shall we say, into the world of French real estate. For what seemed like a Captain Ahab-looking-for-Moby Dick amount of time, I went and looked at French apartments. All kinds of apartments, with bathrooms in the bedrooms and canal views and weird  carpeting and one with a bathroom so big, and a shower stall so small, that I just kept saying that I could use the extra space to rear pigs, which I’m sure endeared me to the realtor to absolutely no end.

The question I am asked most often: “But aren’t Parisians so rude?” There is no good way to answer this question. My personal belief is that all people are kind in roughly the same way. Once I went for a walk between two small French villages, and one of the pathways between them was a narrow country road. A woman stopped her car and asked if I needed a ride, or some help. I told her thank you, but no—I was taking a walk. (Actually what I said was, “Thank you but no am walk now.”) That same day, I saw a mother carrying a child drop a packet of tissues on the metro floor, and another woman picked them up and ran down two corridors to return them. It’s the same sort of thing you’ll see in New York or San Francisco or Tokyo or any other place where humans exist: In my experiences as a traveler, people are kind more often than not.