While my brother and I were braving the private school, my parents went to a French language school in the city center. My mom had taken French classes in high school, but my dad didn't know anything more than "bonjour". So, my mom studied at a higher level, while my dad began with colors and numbers.
Neither of them ever got much of an accent. My dad used to tease me, saying that his French accent could never be as good as mine, since I was like a sponge, soaking in every detail. To this day, he's still amazed by my accent, but he remembers more actual words than I do.
Every day in Aix seemed different. Some days we would visit our American friends, most with huge houses from being businessmen or doctors. Others we would just explore the Côte D'Azur, visiting seaside cities like Nice (pronounced Neece), San Tropez, and Cannes. Sometimes we would drive into San Remo, right on the border with Italy, and others, we would visit Chamonix in the Alps. That trip was my favorite when I was a kid since we didn't really get any snow in Aix with the warm, Mediterranean climate. What little snow we got (only once during the time we lived there) would never stick to the ground and just barely bordered on rain. In Chamonix, we could throw snowballs at each other while only being a few miles away.
France is a very small country, only slightly smaller than Texas, so it's really easy to get around, whether you're visiting another town or showing off the countryside to your family who came to town. It would be a really short train ride if you wanted to go from the South to Paris or Disneyland, and not just because the train was really fast. A few times, we rented a car and drove up the twisting roads to visit Disneyland Paris for the weekend. My brother has always been obsessed with Disney, so he loved it the most. We seemed to always go for a birthday or a celebration as if we were just looking for an excuse to visit.
After the school year ended, we moved to Paris, where it was so much easier to visit everything. It was hard to transition, since it took us months to find an apartment, get settled, and get us into schools. We bought season passes for Disneyland to soften the blow and ended up having them for our entire four years there.
This story is only beginning.
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Being A Missionary Kid
Non-FictionI grew up being different, and I just wanted you all to see a little piece of myself that I don't talk about that often. So, this is a memoir about my 4 years growing up in France.
