Right after the lockdown -which ended up around June 2020 in France- the mailboxes of Mulhouse were filled with letters from Abd Al Malik, in partnership with the city concert hall La Filature. In this letter, the famous French singer/rapper/poet/writer who grew up in Strasbourg, was calling us to write back letters. Letters addressed to Mulhouse, our city, to tell her about our lockdown since the city had been the epicentre of the Covid-19 pandemic in France last February. Everybody here knows someone who has been infected, hospitalized or someone who has died… Everybody here knows someone who was in…
Since we’re all being asked to stay home, I wanted to bring up that subject that had been kind of haunting me for a few years now. What’s home? In English, there’s a distinction between “house” and “home”. The first one would be purely physical, with four walls, a roof and everything that can be found inside, while the other would have a more sentimental value, it’ll be the family household, a place you feel at home, an anchor, a place for returns.
A STORY OF ÇÄKÇÄK, LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT IN KYOTO AND THE GOD YUE LAO’S MAILBOX
It was looking good though. The idea germinated when I first read Sylvain Tesson’s book The Consolations of the Forest, in which he wrote about his isolation in a little cabin on the edge of the Baïkal Lake in Siberia. Then, in 2016, as I just came back from New-Zealand and was about to leave for Taiwan, I hosted a young Russian Couchsurfer in my flat in Strasbourg. She was from Kazan, a city I never heard about and couldn’t even place on a map. …
Before anything else, there’s the taste of sand.
El gusto de la arena, in Spanish.
Even though I’m sitting in front of my breakfast, my tea getting cold, my feet all so curled up, freezing, on the tiled floor, that’s the taste of sand coming back before anything else when I launch the Spanish app on my phone.
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It’s strange how my brain seems to divide itself into two distinct entities. One translating, repeating, searching, learning Spanish with hunger and dedication while the other one is reviving sensations from the past. The taste of…
The past weeks I was looking for a room to rent and was visiting apartments all around the city. Not that I was planning on settling down in the city where I grew up, but they say you have to start somewhere.
So here I was on a gloomy Sunday morning, visiting a house right next to the school my Dad used to work. …
“Ākokay!”
This is how you’ll be welcomed in Lanyu 蘭嶼 also known as Orchid Island in English and Ponso No Tao Ākokay!”(“Island of the people”) in the local language. Lanyu is a 45km² island offshore of the South-East of Taiwan, close enough to the other island of Lüdao 綠島 (Green Island in English), which are both accessible by air or by sea from Taitung.
Since I have a thing with islands and the smaller the better (it’s kind of obvious right now after my travels in New Zealand, Japan, Bali and now Taiwan, not to mention that I spent one…
This a noodle love story.
Since I’m in Taiwan, I’m already living a quite intense love story with the local food. Everything is so tasty, exotic, new. Even after almost a year living here, when the new shouldn’t be that new anymore, my French stomach (the one which can keep eating when I’m not hungry anymore) is still over the moon.
I haven’t written anything about the Taiwanese food yet, so I’m going to tell you about my noodle love story instead: the No Name Noodles.
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That’s my host Una who first brought me…
He’s taking me on his motorbike to show me the city. I’m getting kicked in the face by Ho Chi Minh City. When I first arrive in a new country, there’s always at least a little bit of cultural shock. I’m trying to grab the meaning, the direction, the movement of lives, of people. It’s not as much of a surprise because I read about Vietnam. I’ve seen so many pictures and movies.
But right now, on Alessio’s motorcycle, that’s a whole different story: I’m experimenting Vietnam through a complex range of sensations.
I’m…
Thursday. It’s 5 A.M at KIX airport. I can’t sleep, I’m too excited, I’m still haunted. My heart is still heavy with big surprises that I’m nowhere near ready to leave behind.
Would I ever be? I’ve always been a bit slow on the uptake.
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~ It seems that I fell in love. Again.
And I feel that I’m going to struggle to recover. Again.
It’s a bit like a curse for any traveller, isn’t it? Scattering your crushes like you’d do with pins on a world map.
My love is a wanderer.
~…
(Lis cet article en Français, bébé!)
While travelling, you often get some random acts of kindness. Maybe because you’re more up to it, more open to it, and also more dependent on it. Here, I would like to share some of those encounters with strangers, some of those random acts of kindness, some of those great surprises I had with strangers, and therefore what I learned from it. I’ve got plenty of little stories that I’d like to share and write about. …
