Paris and its Cafés...

"This city, around which one still can travel in a circle past the old gates, has remained what the cities of the Middle Ages, severely walled off and protected against the outside, once were: an interior, but without the narrowness of medieval streets, a generously built and planned open-air intérieur with the arch of the sky like a majestic ceiling above it. . . . It is the uniform façades, lining the streets like inside walls, that make one feel more physically sheltered in this city than in any other. . . . In Paris a stranger feels at home because he can inhabit the city the way he lives in his own four walls. And just as one inhabits an apartment, and makes it comfortable, by living in it instead of just using it for sleeping, eating, and working, so one inhabits a city by strolling through it without aim or purpose, with one’s stay secured by the countless cafés, which line the streets and past which the life of the city, the flow of pedestrians, moves along. To this day, Paris is the only one among the large cities which can be comfortably covered on foot."
-Walter Benjamin