You walk up
and up
and up
the dwindling stairs.
Heavy breaths.
Damn it. How Much Longer?
Last step in sight.
You see traces of your new home for the summer, Cap d' ail. You remember your father showing you a picture of a map before you boarded on the plane. Promising not to get lost, you memorized its location: Squeezed in between Nice and Monaco. It seemed amiss the mountains and the Mediterranean Sea.
Welcome to France.
As you walk in, multiple languages dance in the air like fairies.
French,
German,
Spanish, Italian...
You can barely catch them all.
You navigate through the crowds of students to the check in center. You see there are students here from all over Europe. Many different faces approach you.
Excuse moi, Perdon, 'Scusi.
Check in is done. You find your dorm and drop your bags off. Map in hand, you head for adventure. You begin to explore the "campus". Main attractions on your tour include: the disco, the courtyard, the classrooms, and the cafeteria. As you walk by your last destination, you stop. You are hit with a wall of breath taking aroma. You can smell the cooks preparing your dinner. Scents of oregano, basil, and other spices tease your nose.
Pasta? With a really amazing sauce... maybe?
Suddenly
You close your eyes and breathe in the sea air. You can feel the wind softly wrapping itself around your skin. You listen to the waves roar as they crash into the sandy shore. You swear nothing you have ever seen has been this beautiful.
This post was inspired by my experiences in the many summers I spent at summer camp in France. This gorgeous place is a French school that my mom found though the French embassy back home. I wanted the words in this post to give you a taste of what I felt like being there. The smells, the sights, the sounds. Everything. I absolutely wanted you, dear reader, to experience this culture shock with me. This is why I wrote this as a first person narrative. You share my inner monologue.
ReplyDeleteI ask you, reader, to keep in mind that everything I wrote above has derived from the memories I tapped into as a thirteen year old. As I wrote this, I went through the Facebook album I made for this particular summer, and as I tried to decide what pictures to use… I began to put myself back in that place. I asked: “Self, what did you love most about seeing this place for the first time? Being here alone without your parents, at the mere age of thirteen?” I took in more than the average teen seeing as all my friends in the camp were about to graduate high school. I think this makes my perception of the place different because this, to me, was not some abroad thing to add to my resume, and I wasn’t yet at the point where I took this experience as an excuse to go out and party in Europe. It was just a REALLY big adventure my parents had given to me for my birthday (I turned 14 while in camp that July) Everything I saw and experienced, I ate it all up.
As someone who really appreciates scenery, I felt this piece was just the helping of scenery I needed. I felt like as I was reading through your experiences, that I too would be a part of what I was seeing. Hitting on a bit of a cliche here, but none the less I was captured by your words and felt that I truly knew what it was like to see France.
ReplyDeleteYou didn't seem to tap into a way of telling a story like it was when you remembered it either, which to me is a good thing. Hearing it from the voice of someone who is recalling on their current mind set is much more impressive and capturing to me than someone who tries to tell it like they did back when they were of that age. (Basically telling the story like a thirteen year old.)
All in all, it was an exciting one, and I can tell you much like you ate up the experience of France, I truly saw with what I was reading, a way to eat up the story told here.