The bloated metropolis, administrative capital of France, had appeared, at times as the grandiose, worldly city of light and, at times, a cesspool of menace and despair to my eyes , its maze of twisted streets, never far away from the grand boulevards designed by Baron Haussmann, had seemed like hoary and eyeless monsters ready to devour the unwary.

It was a view certainly distorted by my tortured mind that had been, already, into the grip of depression but nonetheless, as far as my experience went, it was a view rooted in reality.

That I met friends cannot be denied, especially towards the end of the decade.

My passion for photography and writing had led me to that point. The former introduced me to Lazhar, a fellow photographer who helped me shape my still immature photographic vision; the latter ushered me to the legendary Shakespeare and Co bookstore where I joined an English writer's club.

In this bazaar, amidst the bookshelves rising up to the ceiling, the disorderly stacks of books and magazines both new and old, the volumes of poetry, essays, reflections and novels, brainchildren of giants of literature, and under the amber light of an ancient chandelier, we gathered once a week and we read to each other flows of words that we had committed to paper.

There are moments in life, opportunities that the fates throw at you, sparks in darkness that are life changing. The turning point for me was in the shape of an invitation to a party.

And so I found myself propelled into a world that had been, up until now, hidden; an inner world, so to speak, that I never imagined would exist, except within the pages of novels.

It was as if a curtain had suddenly risen, revealing the microscom of a community of expatriates, students, Au pair girls, artists and professionals from all horizon. Their lingua franca was English and, as such, it became my lingua franca as well.

I particularly orbited around American girls who had, without hesitation, accepted me into the nucleus of their social circle whence my shyness and inhibition that had constricted me to a life of loneliness seemed to disintegrate overnight.

There was Jennifer, the studious girl from Philadelphia, there was Carol, the girl with a bubbly personality from upstate New-York, there was Lisa, the quiet girl from Orlando, there was Sarah, the passionate fan of Snoopy and Star Trek from Washington D.C., there was Nicole, the media graduate from New York and there was Jerri, the Navy girl from Ohio.

Within a year, my dream of visiting America, which had always been in my mind, dormant under the surface of my consciousness, began to crystallize as I gradually made plans.

Would it had been possible without support from those friends? I doubt it.

It was in the fall of 1995, that I crossed the Atlantic for the first time, on a TWA flight, as I was giddy as a schoolboy.

From the artificial canyons shaped by the skyscrapers of Manhattan to the sun soaked streets of Orlando, from the imposing and immaculate Washington D.C monuments and buildings, envisioned by Pierre Charles L'Enfant and designed to humble foreign potentates, to the streets of Philadelphia which harbor the Liberty Bell, from the quiet and charming suburban town of Upstate New York to the autumnal wilderness of Pennsylvania national park, my journey to the east coast of the United States was a breathtaking adventure.