I first heard it on my very first day. After Kyle, Ash and I split up after taking the train Paris from the airport, and after wandering around Les Halles metro station for half an hour looking for a place to buy a ticket before realizing that my train ticket would do the trick. As I was going down what seemed like the hundredth stairwell to find the line 4 train to Porte d’Orléans, I heard the unmistakable sounds of the accordion. Getting closer, I found an entire ensemble playing truly beautiful music, both classical and contemporary, and a large crowd surrounding them with cameras, iphones, video recorders, smiles and even a bit of dancing.

Over the next week, I encountered many musicians, from soulful trumpet on a street corner in Saint Germain, where I was staying, to an amazing performance by a man with an electric guitar in the Gare du Nord metro station on my very last day.

The day before the wedding, Kyle invited me to have breakfast and take some photos of Le Royal Monceau hotel, which she was photographing. I figured I’d take some photos as well, to show how two different photographers can see the same location in very different ways. If you’d like to see Kyle’s take, check it out on her website.

I was there for approximately 10 days late last Fall, starting out in Reykjavik and making my way around the main (and in some cases only) road around the island. Aside from the bad fortune to only have a single day of clear night skies and missing out on seeing the Northern Lights, my trip was simply amazing. I got to swim in a geothermal spa, witness some of the craziest and fastest changing weather I’d ever seen, stand atop two continents (Iceland is situated on top of both the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates, and there’s an area where the ridge between them is visible on the surface) and check out the Yule Lads, the Icelandic version of Santa.