In high school I chose to take French as my language elective. We had to pick names so I picked something short, easy to pronounce (unlike my given name) but also something that sounded very cool and classic to me in French. After walking in through la porte magique I could take a break from being my regular boring self and be Sophie. Unfortunately Sophie wasn’t much better at grammar or understanding past participle either, and never got the highest grades but dammit could she roll those R’s. I decided to take AP French just so I could take “The French Trip” to France the summer before my Senior year of high school. I remember being fresh off the plane, dead-tired and walking through the bright hot early afternoon in Toulouse, in disbelief that all I had to do was sit in a dark metal tube for 9 hours to walk through a different country. Apparently I had actually prepared for this, you know for three years, and here I was using something I learned in school in a very real way.

I felt like I had a super power.

I few months ago I realized this trip would be exactly ten years after that summer before senior year, a ten year anniversary celebrated with another long trip to France. I recounted each year since and somehow that’s just how it worked out. I remember feeling very different from the people I passed on the street, maybe they could just smell the United States on me, or maybe dorky still-waiting-for-puberty-to-hit was projecting all possible insecurities on strangers instead of accepting this as one phase of life. Despite the incredible historical and cultural (and societal, and gastronomic.. etc) differences, this time I walk through a city in France and I’m struck by so many more similarities. It’s like in the Simpsons when the people from Shelbyville enter the episode and every regular character has been redrawn with the same-ish clothes, and the same-ish hairstyle. I see the cool cinema just like SIFF back home, I see the hip and beautiful well-designed restaurants full of friends passing friends, bored bank employees, teens with nowhere better to be.

All this to say, how differently I see the world now than I did then. It seems smaller and more familiar while being wildly different and huge at the same time. I have different lenses to look at the people around me (everyone has places to be and lives to live! They’ve got neighbors who love ’em and neighbors who hate ’em!) and the places I walk through to understand the spaces I’m in – History? Wow a lot is going on here! Glacial ice sheets carved this landscape too? What! They know what urban planning is here? Amazing! Apparently I don’t need to explain what landscape architecture is? People love tiny little DIY hand drawings on flyers and sassy sandwich board signs here too?? U got 2 b kid’n me, doc.

These sentences will pass through my head and half a second later I will correct myself thinking “yeah they sort of invented the concept of Landscape Architecture”, momentarily worried that someone could have heard my incredulous statement. Most of my life I’ve thought of other countries as SO DIFFERENT but really we’re all quite similar, growing through life, giving love and feeling love and watching time pass by slowly at first and then really very quickly all of a sudden.

Waiting to run into my doppelgänger called Sophie, who will be wearing the same clothes, but look just a little bit different, and though we’ve never met before we will preform the mirror scene from the movie Duck Soup with Groucho and Harpo Marx. Looking forward to it.