“Paris is the most densely populated city in Europe, with nearly twenty thousand people sharing each square kilometer. To live here is to exist in constant closeness, and to skate here is to learn how to move within that density. The streets are never truly open. Each push is interrupted, each line adjusted, every moment shaped by the presence of others. You are forced to adapt — weaving, dodging, and finding your own path through the flow of people.

Most of them do not see what skateboarding is, or why you insist on moving differently through the city. You ask them to notice, to make space for just a moment, but they rarely respond. Not out of hostility, but because they are absorbed in their own rhythm, already elsewhere in their minds. Everyone in Paris has somewhere to be, and that urgency leaves little room for understanding what falls outside their path.

In such density, individuality fades. Originality is drowned in the crowd, indistinguishable in the endless movement of people. Yet this invisibility is also a kind of release. Surrounded by so many, you are free from the weight of their gaze. In Paris, you can be entirely yourself, precisely because no one is really watching.

Paris holds a paradox: a city where the crowd overwhelms, yet anonymity gives you freedom. And in that sense, it is somewhere to be — a place, even within the mass, where anyone can quietly exist as themselves. “