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.

Because I’m back in the States for Christmas and the most interesting place I’ve been so far is Target, here’s a little story about a trip I took to Antwerp two summers ago.

When I backpacked across Europe with two of my friends one summer, I kept a travel blog, titling each entry with lyrics of a song that somehow involved the city we were visiting: I love Paris when it sizzles… Flower of Scotland… In Dublin’s fair city…. Until I got to Antwerp. I didn’t know any songs with Antwerp in the lyrics. I also didn’t know exactly what we were doing in Antwerp… and neither did anyone else in our hostel. The night before we left, as we all sat over pints of Den Hekensketel beer, we met two Rockabilly band members from LA, a reformed candy kid from Scarborough, a displaced Australian engineer, and three chem majors from the Bay Area, all of whom agreed with us that they had absolutely no idea why they were in Antwerp.

The hostel was run by a Belgian couple. They played a strange mix of Celtic, Hispanic, and Jewish music all day, and had decorated the entire hostel with chandeliers made from tree roots, witches like Provencal santons hanging from the ceiling, and statues of gods and goddesses. The woman loved animals, and when I got up, as I do, at the crack of dawn, she told me about the birds who came to the garden and what their names were as she set out dry oats for them. The man cooked for the entire hostel the first night we got there. It was nice to see everyone sitting around the big table, eating together and talking. People tend to show up at this hostel and stay for a lot longer than they thought. I could see how that would happen. Belgium is a gem that somehow got overlooked by the Western Europe fiends. It’s a middle ground: not south enough to be included on a trip to Spain, France and Italy, not far enough north to be seen with Scandinavia. It hides from the mainstream, but it’s underrated with its gilded architecture, squares with beautiful fountains and bars with Belgian beer on tap for less than you would pay for a Coke in France. Belgium is home to three cities I have seen and loved: Brussels, Bruges, and Antwerp. Antwerp is the perfect mix of the first two: industrial Brussels and touristy Brugge, so perfect that you feel like you’re in a snowglobe.

Antwerp is like New York: alive, overwhelmingly Jewish—the Hasidim run the booming diamond industry here—and easy to navigate. Amsterdam had been a nightmare… nothing like the city that was originally named for it with its grid-patterned streets. We took a walk on the raised boardwalk overlooking the river, and it reminded me of Carl Schurz Park, a small strip that overlooks the East River. The Antwerpians have the same attitude as the New Yorkers. “Always refer to Antwerp as ‘the city’ (’t stad) because to Antwerpians, it’s obvious that their city is the centre of the world.” “Always talk very loudly, and have an opinion on everything. In Antwerp, this is considered normal. In the rest of Belgium, it is considered very annoying.”

A city after my own heart. I feel like this displaced New Yorker could transplant to Antwerp… if only I could master Flemish.

The Hostel:

Den Heskenketel Hostel

Pelgrimsstraat 22