What the little tiny piece I could take from France gave to me

I remember all my trip to France was unpredictable. The time space just bent around me from March 2010 in Santa Marta - Colombia. After some trips in the Colombian coast, collecting some worms for research and the marvelous ascidians to study at the lab. These journeys were a premonition about what was coming, most importantly because I was alone, only me and the sea. The dangers of life in Colombia and a solitary dude like me wandering around, but I don't really ant to sell the idea to you that I am a loner. In fact I am not. These trips represented envisioning in the middle of the adversity, and struggle against the congestion and perils of life to pursue an objective much bigger than me alone can achieve but finding along the road critical transitions and changes on the way of thinking, that like a hammer, stamps life as never before.

I must confess these trips weren't the happiest experience of my life nor the most beautiful. They were what they were. Hard and painful.

One night of May I decided to look on the internet for masters on synthetic biology, with the deep intention to combine synthetic biology and my profound love for two organisms; planarians and ascidians. This love more than a biologist love comes from the fact that they can reconstitute their bodies from pieces of smashed tissue and this for me, is not the most amazing thing, but how these traits relate with high animal architecture or in better terms, biological complexity.

Anyway, I found the opportunity to go this interesting master program in Paris, another one in Germany here in Dresden, another in Sweeden and another one in Japan, I did all the papers and I got accepted in all of them except Sweeden where I missed a lot of documents for my application. None of them offered a scholarship in the first filter except the one in Paris. Paris... that weird city that seems so far aay in time for most of us in Latin America. We relate this place with poets and artists, and never or almost never with science when Marie Curie comes to the memory, but she wasn't French, she was Polish.

I never thought about having the scholarship and just decided to borrow money to the Colombian government, who kindly offers every three months the opportunity to struggle in life in a self oriented way and purpose (money debt and aimed studies to pay the debt from abroad) quite unfairly, this is not open to everybody in Colombia and reflects the stupidity of the clash of social classes that this country suffers and have suffered since it exists and painfully correlates with a racial gradient from bottom to up when compared with social income. Lots of things to think about that, lots of thesis to do about and lots of books to write, perhaps this is why I would like to live at least 200 years. I am dispersed again, so, going back to the scholarships, I was interviewed by Paris Descartes University which is the fifth University from Paris Sorbonne that university everybody who has never visited it, always says. Oh! nice campus!, yeah sure! very nice is spread all over Paris dumb! hahahaha

The interview was very nice, I could let myself go with my entangled and confusing ideas, in the end. I got the scholarship. And then I freaked out. I felt the pain of the sky falling over, leaving Colombia without any support other than 400€ that my father gave to me plus 100 USD. I took a flight, and started a new life in less than 1 month. Shocking! One day I was hanging from a stone almost dying because I am stupidly curious ( I never told this to anyone) and tried to catch a beautiful cactus in the top of a stone, of course I got stucked and literally hanging from there in the middle of nowhere at the Tayrona National Park. And at the next month I was walking through the Louvre museum towards Les tuilleries and L'arc du Triumph. Just crazy shit!, it revolves your mind and makes you feel that you never moved but the planet moved towards you. To be sincere I never expected.

At my arrival my old and incredibly and amazing super crazy and eloquent histrionic and smart friend Tanai was waiting for me at Charles de Gaulles airport. I came into the metro and in some minutes I was walking around the Pantheon, Boulevard Arago and so... life begun.

My reaction wasn't nice at all, Parisians are proud by nature and I had to learn to be proud of myself at that time and forget the sadness that an average well aware person without bad feelings have to face living in such an aggressive country as Colombia. We are aggressive by nature and always have this bad intentions thinking twice behind any act we do, the good and the bad side. Of course we are amazed with the bad side of everything and we just forget to balance the two of them.

I was upset because I was and looked like an immigrant, and not a Colombian one since I don't have the traits. But a from somewhere North Africa. And pretty much Paris urban's population has a huge amount of middle orient and Africa people plus people from the islands overseas so they always expected me to speak French and I replied with english, this is more or less like seeing a "corroncho" at the street trying to buy an "empanada" in the middle of barranquilla and trying to modulate some english with french accent (WTF!). It just took me some time and after a conversation with my very good friend Oscar Suescún, he advised me to copy the dressing way of them so it would be much more easy to interact. So I did it very slowly, trying here and there learning by osmosis some French. Until I established some kind of way, but I had to be very different from the suburban areas, I wasn't from North Africa nor from anywhere else than a Latino and well educated with some knowledge about my surroundings and the most important thing, ready to deal with adversity in a very positive way.

The whole opening came after kind of a depression I had at the south of France during the winter. Paris wanted me to stay with it, but the sea had some important business for me, and it was dragging me out from it. Alone at the south of France in a very particular place like Villefranche sur mer. So far, my struggling level in life was growing with every simple thing I could think and do right away. Being alone made myself to find myself during other many nights looking at the horizon and realizing that the summer was approaching and the cold was leaving the air. Again, I was surrounded of cliffs. And of course I had to put my life in risk to prove I am alive deep within. I am alive damn it! and jumped to the water of 13°C or even less a morning of March. Nine meters and a cold shock under the dark waters of villefranche's bay.

Life improved severely for me after that. It was simply magic, from that moment on, people was kind with me, I was full of energy, filling the space deep in my heart, learning a lot of things, propelled by the wind, the water, the golden sun that never goes away from Nice. I forgot about the sadness, I stopped to worry about the poor people of the world, I wasn't thinking about how to make money, then something amazing happened to me. After 8 years and maybe a bit more, I started to write again and to draw, I was seeing the colors for real with my bare eyes, I was aware of the evolutionary meaning of them, the waves of the sea and the reflection of the sun directly against my retina were distributed as a poisson process and I could write a story out of it, poems flooded my fingertips, I was sleeping with my heart beat every night as a cat sleeps with its tiny engine inside. I was a cat! when I used to be a dog!

Inspiration as always was the main objective of my life now it is for real. Love appeared and pain too, they just know how to hang around together very very well. Beautiful eyes I saw, and mouths I kissed, all fed the burning hunger of life that became into a light guiding my steps.

I went back to Paris to confront my fears, but they were not anymore, I bought a bike, a good one whom I secretly named Petra, as a plant I had in Colombia and testified many of my adventures at home. Petra also did it, she was very reliable and quite sexy. She also made my jeans to feel tight around and this of course cause some effect in time and space. I was getting to know Paris on my bike, riding here and there, loving it more and more every day. But don't missunderstand me, I am not loving my lifestyle. I am loving the city as its complex concept which encodes modernity itself. Paris is the nucleus of western society, starting from the encyclopedism that today is called wikipedia, crossing most of the thermodynamics that has to be with nuclear plants to cell phones and more, all the medicine and surgery techniques, politics and diplomacy, of course architecture and mostly style in all of these aspects. I don't have the need to remark that design comes in everything that has being done in France, and style of course. It makes you want it whatever it be to go deep into your memory.

I am not French anyway, I don't belong to France nor Paris, and for sure whatever thing I can say here can be subjective and open to any criticism which I would kindly accept because is my perception through my mind, particularly educated by my parents, in a specific milieu, under special conditions, and stimulus in time that in the end summed up, are just pressing the computer pads with no friction in my mind.

Summer came and so the never ending pass of red fake hearts blown to the air. Fun filled my life, wine, some belly dancing here, studies there, readings here and there, marihuana, studies, reading, cycling, writing, museums, talking and talking, cafés, opera, chill out, reading and studies, party and so. Life passed working hard at my laptop, very passionate about, thinking deeply, and having good times. Just perfect. Enjoying the mornings with a shared breakfast with my friend Tanai, spending the morning at the lab, then the roof and then outside. A trip to Croatia, whose details were intense as the Adriatic sea and as Miro Radman's ideas. Another jump from a higher hill to the Adriatic sea and again a bolt of sea energy as it always give to me in a special present, filled me and repaired me.

Then I started to feel stressed, the future was walking towards me, my master was almost over and I had to figure out how to keep my paradise or move on and get 29 in 2012. Damn! 29 dude! scratching my thirties and living like 22, well I always said I was neotenic and indeed I am or maybe not so much right now... July entered with the rush of the PhD applications, and some other air hearts that drained me somehow but then Julia appeared. Her intense look and way since we saw for the very first time captured us in an orbiting centripetal and high speed torrent of emotions, all of them amazing as the combination of us. She is Russian, but lived since early age in America and knows three languages all of them sounds to me amazingly well from her, specially Russian. She is passionate, and also very logic a hard combination, and she is lovely and sweet. This is only for you the readers, the rest I keep it for myself.

The waves of time and what France gave to me is relative as when I was studying in Bogotá and I wanted to go back to Montería for holidays. Now my "home base" is Paris. And even thought I am not French nor Parisian and I don't speak nor write French fluently (so far), I feel free to express what I feel with fraternity and equality to you my friends and readers.

Now Dresden - Germany is another story, and another adventure in which I am going into. Everything is for that, living free and inspired.


Andrés