They didn't know it was impossible, so they did it.- Attr. Mark Twain
It was over forty years ago and from our perspective - we who are too young to have lived that moment - it seems like it was a miracle. It couldn't be done, not in a time where computers the size of wardrobes did not have one tenth the computing power of a single of our smartphones. Pocket calculators didn't exist. Advanced materials didn't exist, rocket science barely existed: it was these guys' job to
Is this how it ends? Is this how we leave to never return? I had expected more bells and whistles, more promises to never get out of touch, more anything. But it seems I had a romanticized idea of farewells and goodbyes and I think emotion made me think that way – it is not every day you have finished class for good. I still do not really know what I expected, in all honesty. Something, anything. Not this. I did not understand why I felt nothing when teachers congratulated us, said they’d been happy
I stepped out of the plane with no small amount of apprehension. It had been ten years since I had last set foot in this city, in this country even. I said goodbye, I left and I didn’t come back until this winter. How much has this place changed in ten years? I wondered if it would be the same as the idealised image of it I had formed over time in my memory. Would it be as beautiful? Would I find there what I had come to find? Time would tell. I had one week to find out.
I have travelled
"We're almost there", yells our instructor over the howling wind. "The pass should be just above us and from there on all we have to do it to follow the ridge to the summit!"
He pauses. It isn't snowing anymore but the wind screams unabated and the clouds form a thick fog around us that makes it hard to see more than ten meters away. The temperature has since long dropped under -20°C and the wind makes it feel like -30°C.
"However, it's all
Funny, how you can realize you've really missed something. That something, for me, was a city, and though I can honestly say Toulouse was easily in the top five of places where it feels good to be, nothing can top the city I'm now back to. My city, the only one I can say this about, me who's moved every three years.
Let me tell you about my city.
One of the first things about Lyon, one that explains maybe a few other things, is that it's old. Terribly, incredibly old.