A Time When You Felt Extremely Happy

During my winter break the December of my senior year in high school, my parents gave me the opportunity to visit my cousin who is more like a best friend or a really close sister to me. Dina lives and attends acting school in Paris, France. I spent most of the days alone traveling from museums such as the Musee d’Orsay, Versaille, and the Louvre, and nights with Dina going out to a café on the second story of the Eiffel tower, to Moulin Rouge, or the Pantheon to drink a specialty of hot wine served with a variety of warm winter spices. It was between my visits to these touristic destinations that I became infatuated with the shopping scene of Les Galeries Lafayette.

Immediately upon exiting the Metro on the street where Les Galeries Lafayette sit, I was dazzled by the gaudy decorations of Christmas lights composing all sorts of geometric forms. Each department of the Galeries was ornamented with a colossal snowflake of gold lights soaring to nearly each rooftop. Below the building, hanging above the covered shopping areas, filled with little booths containing products that are typically sold to tourists such as berets and Eiffel tower lighters, were globes composed of the same lights. These eccentric disco balls stood out in the grey Parisian air like toy suns, ascribing blvd. Haussmann the appearance of a rich paradise. They radiated a magical aura of the holiday season and made the eyes of each shopper enlarge at the site of any window display of Chanel totes, Cartier rings, Bergdorf Goodman Scarves, and refined toy designs.

            I would never describe myself as an avid consumer, but it was not hard for the intriguing displays and environment to lure me into their trap. Setting foot into the main department of Les Galeries Lafayette, I caught myself forming comparisons between its supernatural dome and seeing the enchanting mosaics of Notre Dame for the first time. Its open space and immensity in size were comparable to speechless shock of standing before the entirety of Versailles. This portion of the infamous Galeries was the make-up department arranged in a vast circular room, with a Christmas tree dazzling below, a circular dome created by round stone arches of Greco-Roman antiquity. I must have circled around this sector of the store for a while, stunned by its design, until I finally wandered through the different stories of the building. Each clothes designer had his or her own nook with racks of their clothing arranged more like art work in a manner to give off the quality inherent in their design-strategy. The more spunky brands had sporadic rack arrangements while color groupings and mathematically spaced racks or shelves displayed more clean-cut fashions. Les Galeries Lafayette easily churned my cheek muscles to face to the top of its dome; I was perfectly content, standing in the midst of a structure with a beauty as classical as Boticelli’s Venus and as striking as Manet’s Olympia.