Two years ago I embarked on an exciting journey which I’ll never be able to forget. 10 months of being an exchange student in France taught so much to me. Every second of it was an experience, and so was going back. The initial idea was to make my host family and my biological family meet each other and to show my biological family the environment where I lived for almost a year. But this trip ended up being so much more to me.
Our itinerary started from Paris, where everything was normal for me. We strolled around, visited the north of France and then took a high-speed train to the south. That’s when my nostalgia started to begin.
First, we went to Antibes, where our hotel was located. Antibes was one of the main hang-out spots for me and my friends when I was there a year ago. It was nice seeing the little ice cream shop where we always bought ice cream together, the Pablo Picasso museum where I went at least five times, the main street in the old town where we bought postcards to send to our families back home, the café where we had chocolate crepes as a sweet treat, the alleys in the old town where we always got lost and so on. Everything was so familiar, everything was just as I remembered, even the taste of the ice cream. Except that, I knew nobody. All my friends were away, they were at home. So nothing felt the same. Right then, I was getting ice cream from that shop, I was visiting the Picasso museum, I was walking down the main street, I was eating a crepe, I was getting lost in the alleys of the old town, but not us. The postcards were remaining on the shelf because no one was away from their families. Two years ago I had come here as a stranger but then I became sort of a local. I knew people, I knew how to get from one point to another, I knew how to deal with a struggle. But when I returned back, I was again a complete stranger.
Our next stop was Cannes. The small town which was our first choice when we wanted to swim. When you leave the train station in Cannes, all you have to do is to walk straight in order to reach the beach. That’s why, we would always follow the same path. This habit led some cafés on that road to become our usual hang out and eating spots, so I had the opportunity to see all those places in an only walk, where we would always eat while passing through the road in question. Some of them were closed, which made me a little sad. But the majority stayed the same. I mean, for other people it was the same. For me, nothing was as it had used to be.
Then we headed to Nice, the biggest city of the French riviera, where we would go shopping, eating “la socca”, walking by the coastline. Nice didn’t give me as much nostalgia as Antibes did because, I suppose, Nice was a big city and didn’t feel like home in the first place. During my exchange year, I would always take newcomer exchange students to give a tour around the city. I would take everyone to the Castle of Nice, where you need to climb a lot of stairs to make it to the top. And I climbed those stairs with people from all around the world, from Thailand to the United States, from Japan to the Czech Republic, from Italy to Argentina, from Chile to Costa Rika. It was incredibly enriching having such a friend group. So when I was climbing those stairs again, with my father this time, memories came into my mind. And I smiled.
When I was still in France, one of the volunteers of our exchange association had told me that an exchange year was a two-year-long experience, the exchange year itself and the year after it. I hadn’t believed her back then, but now I come to understand why she said such a thing. When I tell people, who are close to me right now, how going back to France made me feel, they can’t relate to it, which I understand. Maybe my friends would get how it felt.
