WANDERLUST has captured Capital Times’ past correspondents, who are now wide-eyed and abroad, taking their wee bit of Wellington to the world.

John Watson has lived in France since April this year, and has spent most of his time in Antibes, doing day work on the docked boats, busking to get by, and writing for passion.

ERNEST Hemingway once said, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.”
We arrived in Paris in the springtime; a cliché, but everything in Paris is. Old men with berets playing accordions on cobblestone streets, women riding on bicycles with baguettes in their baskets, and couples kissing by the river Seine.
I have always thought I dressed well, but seeing the Parisians’ blazers, coats, scarves and glasses, left me feeling like a philistine in my black skinny-legs and leather jacket: an outfit deemed cool in Wellington.
I had my first experience of the French hostility towards English-speaking people at a patisserie where I ordered a croque monsieur (a cheese and ham toastie). Though I spoke (admittedly disjointed) French, the man behind the counter picked up my accent, and speaking in English, asked me if I’d like it heated up, to which I replied “yes”. He then short changed me by ten euro in a flurry of taking and replacing money from my hand. I realised too late, then when I opened it, I found it cold.  I imagined demanding back the ten euro in a gruff Clint Eastwood-style voice accompanied by a steely stare and a slight raise of the upper lip, or breaking out a blood-curdling haka...
It was 12 degrees, and the steam from our breath seemed to make our walk along the Seine, looking at books and black and white photographs in the stalls that lined the river, all the more romantic.
There is an air in Paris that I find hard to describe; a sense of being alive, of being involved in something important and wonderful.
When I was 16 I “joined” the resistance to the Vietnam War (around 30 years after it had finished) by writing anti-war quotes on my bedroom wall, which my father made me rub out.
Now I was in a place that had witnessed revolution, foreign occupation, protests, starvation, barricades made in narrow alleys by the dissatisfied poor and public beheadings
Paris was somewhere I felt I could live for a while as a journalist, writer or student. I had an idea of what Hemingway was talking about.  Three days was not enough.