I am lost somewhere in Montparnasse. It is not a big deal that I am lost, I am not in a hurry and the university semester has finished, the last exam page turned, the last pen put down. Wandering along under the shadow of the Tour Montparnasse in the Avenue Maine, I am stopped by a group of girls in their early twenties, my age. Flustered, in English, they ask me the way to H&M. I don't know whether to laugh or cry at where I'm having to give directions to where they could be going in this amazing city, but as a twenty-something year old female myself, I know the importance of retail therapy. I reply, in English, and hope my directions are clear.

"Are you from here?" they ask, clocking my grasp of the English tongue weighed up with the knowledge of the nearest H&M to the fifteenth arrondissement.

"Yes, I am," I say.

And it's true.