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| The baker's opposite the primary school, getting a pain au chocolat was the highlight of my school days... |
I grew up in
Roissy-en-Brie, about 25 km East of Paris in Seine et Marne, a rural place in the 1960', complete with farms and corn fields. It steadily mushroomed into a prime example of suburbian "ville-dortoir" where most adults would take a train to work early in the morning and huge chunks of the place turned into a ghost town in the daytime... Not that it was much funkier in the evenings...
As you can guess I couldn't wait to get out.
About twenty years after leaving, I went back to spend a day retracing my own steps - literally - walking the streets I most used in childhood and adolescence, taking in what had changed and what hadn't.
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| The back of the station |
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Chateau d'eau/Water reservoir
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| The avenue along the cemetary, its iron gates sticking out in the background. |
It wasn't a particularly rough, and certainly not a chic suburb, it just felt as nothing ever happened... then again I might have felt like that no matter where I grew up. As a small child I was very attached to bits of Roissy, it was home and I was loved there.
As a teenager I grew itchy feet and and as soon as I passed my Baccalaureat, went as an au-pair to Dublin for a change of scenery.
