Born in Africa, in Congo, Brazzaville, from a civil engineer father, I am travelling since my childhood. Punctuated by intervals in France, in Blois, in the Loire valley, my scholarship was worldwide : half a year of kindergarten in Nigeria, four years in Venezuela, in Caracas, three of them being in the French junior school Colegio Francia, and one in a Venezuelian junior school, Colegio San Antonio, where I was the only French pupil and had to speak and work in Spanish, I keep very fond memories of my Venezuelian schoolmates, three years in England in Folkestone in Dover College Preparatory School, one year of high school in the Französisches Gymnasium in Berlin.
Amongst all these countries, even if it’s not a very touristic destination for non Spanish speaking countries, Venezuela is certainly the one which made the biggest impression on me, a perfect climate for me in Caracas, always hot but not too much thanks to being in the mountains, an extraordinary and very varied fauna and flora (what is this ridiculous propaganda of the French national education system trying to make pupils of junior schools believe that France is the most varied country in the world? I have only one thing to say: academicians please go abroad! Wonderful white sand Caribean beaches, on islands with coconut trees which can be accessed by motorboat, Impressive waterfalls throwing out incredible quantities of water, an extraordinary and very furnished jungle, a part of it none other than the Amazon rainforest, Andes with their much cooler climate, and their inhabitants wearing colourful ponchos, often travelling with lamas, the Tepuys, those very high mountains with flat mountain-tops and abrupt slopes where unique animal and vegetal species can be found, a very high number of spectacular and sometimes unique animal species – chiguires, hoatzins, sloths, tapirs, toucans, parrots, hummingbirds, caimans, etc., this country has it all and has nothing to be envious of France of, in my opinion it would even be the opposite).
This childhood has not always been an easy one, it meant having to make new friends at every new departure time, for a child keeping in contact is not an easy task, especially as there was no internet back then, to leave somewhere meant losing sight with my classmates forever, and have to start everything all over again. Not really considered as French when I was in France, given my uncommon life experience, which meant a different culture and a different point of view on the world, I was still a foreigner when I went abroad, and the fact that my father’s destinations where less and less exotic didn’t help either. I liked hot weather and was going from colder to colder country, ending up with Berlin’s continental weather… Ironically, as soon as high school was finished and I had to go studying, my parents went to Korea, in Seoul, a town where I would have loved being in high school, the climate is as harsh there during winter as in Berlin, even if summer is close to tropical (rain included), but what an interesting cultural difference… Well I guess I still was lucky, as I could go there two times, a total of a month and a half.
From a distance I was very lucky to have that childhood, this type of experience opens up the mind. I studied in France, for financial reasons, one year in Nice and then many in Poitiers, a very pretty town. When came the time to search for a job, I did what a lot of young French people do, I went to Paris, I dreamt of finding a job which would enable me to travel, but as a graphic designer, this was not really possible, and going directly abroad wasn’t a very good option either, the countries which offer a good salary to graphic designers being the less interesting ones in my opinion. In that context, after six years living in Paris and the election of a French president which is everything I despise in that country, I felt I was suffocating. The French right wing extremists getting more and more votes through years had worried me, especially in 2002 when they were present during the second round of the presidential elections against the moderate right wing, 20% of the people having voted for it. It’s close to disappearance in 2007 worried me even more, it meant that the ‘moderate’ right wing had taken up enough of the party’s ideas to earn the support of the people who used to vote for it. I wasn’t reassured neither by Sarkozy’s discourses anterior to the election, saying he wanted to clean up the least wealthiest suburbs of their problems with karcher, nor by the one made in Dakar just after the election, explaining that the African people were responsible of their own actual problems, as if Africa’s colonization and the way it’s countries boundaries were drawn with a ruler by European countries, artificially mixing different populations who didn’t get along with each other wasn’t responsible for the actual inter-ethnical massacres that can be seen there today, amongst other things.
I therefore decided to go abroad again, and for me a country is not discovered by spending a few days of holidays in it, but by living there for many months, in order to have an immersive cultural experience. For the time being this was concretized by a one year Working Holiday Visa in Australia. What will come afterwards, I don’t know, unfortunately financial reality and the limitations to the kind of visas which are possible to get don’t enable me to go anywhere I want, therefore I will see when the time comes.