Paris

Taking a smaller role means fewer invites to be expected On Jan. 20, a meeting was held in Paris that brought world leaders together to discuss plans to combat ISIS. The United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Australia, were all invited to the meeting, but not Canada. Since then, various media outlets have made …

We soon learned the location of the shooting was mere metres across the street from several of our apartments. Just the week prior, many of us had come together to celebrate a birthday only a few steps away from the Bataclan theatre. The subsequent hours were spent awaiting messages of assurance from friends in the affected area.

Let me be clear—I was raised on chicken and beef kabobs. I’ve never faulted chicken for its ability to satisfy me, but prior to coming to France I never understood the French fascination with raw meats and animals that have no business out of picture books.

In search of the migrant reality, I decided to visit a nearby Syrian refugee camp in Paris. Located just outside tourist hotspots, the camp was a stark contrast to what I’d grown accustomed to in my first month. In the middle of the road an entire community was set up. About 60 families, from children to the elderly, were centred around a camp lined with tents and laden with garbage.

The people who drive the cars are just about as fancy as the cars themselves. Everyone here is thin and beautiful. It’s almost perplexing how skinny all of inhabitants manage to stay, despite how rich the food is. I say almost because there are stairs about every 100 metres, so it’s not really that perplexing. Come to France if you want to lose weight eating strictly butter.

The privilege of being able to ignore such slaughter comes easily to the developed world. After so much misery has leaked into the news from crisis-ridden regions like Africa and the Middle-East, the exhaustion of public and political sympathy is no surprise.

A group of six University of Ottawa engineering students have returned from a prize-winning bout at the Valeo Innovation Challenge in Paris, where they showed off their designs for a hybrid vehicle.