One Weekend, Two Cities: Paris and Luxembourg, Again

Paris is where this project began, in May 2024, and I've gone back more than once since — not out of habit, but because it's the place that started all of this, and it keeps pulling me back on its own schedule rather than mine.

In June 2025, almost exactly a year after that first plaque, I placed a new one in Paris again. Coming back to the same city, one year later, with a new plaque in hand, felt like its own small ceremony — proof that the project hadn't stopped growing after that first quiet afternoon in 2024.

The first plaque was installed in Paris. And now, exactly one year later, a new one in this beautiful city again!

Two days later, I was in Luxembourg — which, as it turns out, has become something of a habit of its own. This was the second time a 5=3 plaque had gone up there, and both times it happened right after a stop in Paris, as if Luxembourg had quietly attached itself to the end of every Paris trip.

Returning to a city is a different kind of story than reaching a new one for the first time. A week spent moving through four German cities back to back is its own kind of chapter — the thrill of new walls, new streets, somewhere the project has never been before. Paris and Luxembourg are the other chapter: the one where a place already knows you, and you go back not to conquer new ground but just to say, again, that the formula still holds. I don't think either kind of trip matters more than the other. The map needs both.

Neither city needed a dramatic story this time. Sometimes the meaningful thing about a place isn't a single big moment, but the fact that you keep returning to it — that a formula written on a wall in 2024 is still finding its way back to the same streets, one year and two years later, still saying the same thing.