Bordeaux and Palmiers

I found these pictures lurking in my iPhoto… I can’t believe I’ve never talked about Ypres before.

I’ve mentioned before that when I was 14, I spent several months in the north of France. What I may not have mentioned is that my baby sister did the same thing seven years later.

It was so strange to be back in my old town this past January, when I rode the train an hour to the north to pay her a visit. It was as though she was living my life: going to the same school, seeing the same sights. Rewinding my life and seeing what it had been like at 14 through my own eyes at 21 was strange, to say the least.

Even her host father reminded me of mine from 2001: he cared so much about my baby sister growing to love the North.

The North can be a hard place to love, especially in the winter, as the popular film Bienvenue Chez les Ch’tis showed audiences recently. The North is often viewed as a cold place: not only temperally, which is true, but also in its attitude. People from the North of France are caricatured as drunks, as stupid… it’s not a flattering portrait to say the least, and I have no idea where it comes from.

The Northern French, like the North of France, just takes a bit of getting used to. You may have to try a little bit harder to fall in love than you did on the Riviera, where sun and beaches seem to make everything easy and friendly and fun. Les provençaux may seem friendly when you first meet them, but it was the Northerners who welcomed me into their home and made me a part of their family without a second thought. My host father dug deep into the heart of the North for me, and when I visited my sister, I noticed that hers was doing the same.

One afternoon while I was visiting for the weekend, he, the host mother, my sister and I drove about an hour to Ypres, just over the Belgian border. We wandered through the old town, got a hot cup of coffee when our fingers got too cold, meditated over the memorial for victims of war.

I took endless pictures of the Northern architecture, austere and daunting, and I noticed that my baby sister was a far better photographer than I would ever be. In the end, it wasn’t my life she was living, I finally realized. Even if the experience seemed the same, a bizarre déjà vu, she was making it her own. Seven years later, she was far more grown up than I had been at her age, when I had first arrived in France.

I don’t know what the future holds for her: if she’ll decide to expatriate, like I did, or if she’ll follow another dream back in the States. I don’t know if she’ll write about her experiences years later, like I have a tendency to do, or if her gorgeous pictures will be enough to send her back in time, to the three months where she got to live in the North of France, where she learned that not everything is about Paris, where she, too, for three months, became a part of a Northern French family.