I was already in love with Paris when I stepped onto the plane.

I’d venture to say that we all flew here with grandiose illusions of the city, although upon arrival, none, it seems, proved close to reality. For me, it was when my cramping butt – a parting gift from the eight-hour flight – was greeted by a dreary, angry-colored sky that I began to pull out of a post-coital haze with the city of my dreams.

Over the years, I’ve found that people often search for ways to find hope in testing situations. They either operate under the dictum that everything happens for a reason or find comfort in the belief that when things progress en route with Murphy’s Law – in which everything that can go wrong does – they will turn out all right in the end. Paris was proving to be a test.

Three girls and I chose to live at the Foyer Naples, a YWCA equivalent strictly for female students. We chose this “convent,” sold on promises of French friends, spacious rooms and hardwood floors.

Our decision ended us in an empty, dust-ridden, run-down building, seven stories tall with no elevator. Lugging my bags up to the fifth floor rivaled the total amount of exercise I had gotten all summer.

The rooms must have been the Parisian standard of spacious, as were the beds, if you could call them that, which were slightly larger than a park bench, although incidentally, no softer. The only conclusion we could make about the hardwood floors seemed to be that the closer to the ground floor you were, the more dirt on your hardwood floor you got.

The chipped wooden bedroom windows, which locked in an old-fashioned and arcane sort of way (meaning, of course, that they DO NOT lock, but rather swing open at the first gust of wind), opened into the street, and less the erratic sound of an occasional motorbike, the neighborhood remains eerily silent.

The unrivaled highlight of Naples, however, proved to be the toilet.

Not only did the thin walls provide us with the unique delight of hearing every toilet flush at all hours of the morning, but after completing a classified mission to the single toilet on the floor, located in a closet-sized room with a light that turns itself off every 30 seconds, I reached for the toilet paper only to discover that … there is no free toilet paper at Naples; it’s all B.Y.O.T.P.

The toilet paperless state of emergency drew us into a panic to find any open supermarche or Monoprix. To our dismay, iron curtains locked all the shops, declaring their obvious state of closure. Apparently, in Paris, nothing stays open on Sunday less the Disney store on the Champs Elysees, open for tourists to squander their money.

“C’est normal,” our residential director had said with a shrug.

Nothing about M.I.A. toilet paper seemed to be normal.

But, I suppose what I find most amusing about Paris is not the rough toilet paper, which despite their apple or peach scents, do not fail to scratch when they attend to their business nor the 3,60 euro glasses of wine that are cheaper to purchase than water at the caf‚. It is not the traffic that never seems to obey traffic signals but always seems ready to run you over, nor is it the weather, which always remains cold when my windows persist to blow open while I try to sleep, and becomes hot when I am walking along the Boulevard St. Michel while trying not to appear as though I had just bathed – in my own sweat.

No, what charms me about this city are the people: the people who tolerate fruit scented toilet paper (and bringing their sweet smelling papier de toilette to the toilet), the outlandish price of water and the man purse for its practicality. They are the people who respond to bizarre circumstances with “c’est normal” and have the ability to see broken, falling-apart windows as historic, quaint and possessing character. They are also the ones who have miraculously mastered the art of wearing a blazer in the heat of noon without breaking a sweat while others, like me, struggle to remain dry in a tank top.

So, perhaps I will buy into the age-old adage, and perhaps these next months will turn out to be fabulous, full of TP and less of sweat. If not, I’m pretty sure I’ll learn to love the city anyway – after all, the peeling edges and imperfections seem to be what give Paris its character.