Liège: my town, my roots. 
For a long time, running through my head and heart, the desire to talk about my hometown, and to share, perhaps, to those who do not know the desire to visit it.
But mainly, the nostalgia of an expatriate (even voluntary) that makes me want to write a column on the "short" part of my life that I have passed, compared to the one I've been living over 40 years in my adopted city.
This column will be, above all, memories and emotions, each time I return and a way to remember and to remind those I love, or who read me one day what it means to me.
First, to help you mentally visualize the city, I will quote the beginning of a book written by a native of Liege (Vera Feyder), having spent his childhood, then moved to Paris (little book where I found the feelings, sensations and emotions that I myself have known).
Fluvial and Bishops, the city has always offered low to high range of his blue panorama Mosan mists and fumes that have never been able to emerge without drowning, for all time, booms, towers, steeples what made Liege, on the edge of the first millennium, a Mecca of European clergy.
Liege, Walloon Lidja is a very old city (it has long been a powerful principality headed by a prince-bishop's palace which became the current courthouse), built at the bottom of a basin formed by the confluence of the Meuse and Ourthe and surrounded on all sides by steep hills often, a situation that will influence its history and how to live.
Like, I do not count here a historical chronicle I will speak now of my memories and where I lived.
I was born, rue de Kempen (whose name comes from the vast sandy plain that extends over the provinces of Antwerp and Limburg), very steep street, dating from around 1870, and that leads from downtown at Mount St. Walburga.
For the record, I am, it seems, was born on a Sunday football game of the favorite team of our family doctor (my father's uncle!). Thus, a staunch supporter of this team, having left the stadium and unreachable (at that time, no cell phone!) My father found himself alone with his stepmother completely distraught mother to give birth to help in the kitchen. This episode was traumatic but ultimately it has always done well left unforgettable memories and great resentment towards his uncle .......
And who knows, maybe this is why I do not like Sunday and I hate football!
I have no recollection of me this house. My parents moved a few years after my birth to go live in a larger apartment in the house of my father's aunts (two spinsters, sisters of the famous uncle Maurice, the doctor who had abandoned my father in the event of the birth of her first child .....). In fact, my sister was born and the apartment on Rue de Kempen was too small, especially since my maternal grandmother, widow of the first world war, was still living with my parents at that time.
I was 3 years.
This house stood hop street in the neighborhood of Fétinne, not far from Park Boverie situated between the Meuse and its derivation.
The name of this street (the hops) recalls the previous destination in the neighborhood who lived many years of growing hops. This street was created in the nineteenth century to link the street Fétinne the streets of Vennes.
I kept very vivid memories of years spent in this house.
I passed the apartment of my parents than my aunts regularly, Mom was busy with her second baby.
I remember regular trips with Aunt Marietta, school principal, who regularly took me to the Zoo or Park Boverie which took place in the World Expo 1905.
I loved the rose garden, all gardeners know me and offered me a rose regularly. Of these distant memories, just maybe my love of plants and Gardening ... Who knows?
I also remember the deer pen, the little squirrel named "Kid" and who came to eat me in hand when I called, and the beautiful peacock of the enclosure near the Mosan, tearoom Park situated along the Meuse and where you saw scroll apace barges on the river ..... Less
good memories, this one: learning to write with Aunt Mariette, slap on the wrist because I was left-handed, and he had to write the right hand!
Then I entered the kindergarten in the Rue des Vergers and that's when I knew "My First Prev love": he was called Coco Mévisse and we were walking in the garden not the middle of the yard, hand in hand ..... and we were regularly punished for our disobedience!
Then, the financial situation of my parents has improved and they could buy a "mansion" that belonged to his grandfather Papa, Avenue de l'Observatoire.
The relocation of the street to hop Avenue, took place just before I entered elementary school.
The Avenue de l'Observatoire, so called because of the scientific establishment located on the plateau de Cointe where she lived, was situated in a residential area.
The house was large, spacious and comfortable with a garden where I played a lot, a large bedroom on the second floor of the house, overlooking the street, a busy crossing the trolley amount Cointe, and trains coming Guillemins station and crossing the steel bridge at the bottom of the avenue in a lot of noise as they climbed the steep coast Years after leaving the station ... And let's not forget that, given my age starts to become "canonical", when I arrived in this house, locomotives were still steam! Most
part of my life took place in Liège there.
I went to primary school Avroy Boulevard, built on a former branch of the Meuse, and connects to the Rue St. Gilles Street Guillemins.
This school still exists and is located next to the Masonic Grand Lodge dating from 1775. The huge bronze doors, decorated with Egyptian Pharaonic intrigued us very much, and funny stories, a little scary traveling on what was going on inside this mysterious cave .... So that the few times where it opened and we could see a long corridor leading at the lodge is barely, if we dared to look, so "the little girls" that we were supposed to be scared!
I spent my primary school in this school and for high school, I went a little further down the same boulevard Lycée Léonie de Waha: the most famous high school for girls (at the time the schools were not mixed).
The school was built on the site of the former glassworks Avroy around 1900.
I followed the course of Greco-Latin humanities, die now defunct, training gave me a taste of the language of literature and perhaps also of writing.
That's when I knew in the last years of high school, my first love lovers, boyfriends waiting for us, my friends and I, after school, in secret from parents and teachers: You can not joke with "decency"!
There were those who made our heart beat a teenager (often from the street the Athenee Poor Clares, or the College Saint-Servais (now that my grandchildren attend son: the story is an eternal! ) and then the one I was running away like the plague, Jean-Michel the little red head in front of our house and harassing me, hiding behind trees on the boulevard to the kind of high school, because he knew I do not support, then arise suddenly in my way ......
What memories that move me and make me laugh today!
My last year of high school, I met the man who would become my husband and the father of my children. And I fell madly in love!
As he was Tunisian, as you say, my parents, petty bourgeois in mind well-meaning and often a little narrow, did not welcome this association with great joy, quite the contrary. The forbidden fruit is familiar is always more charming than others, so it was time
meetings in secret in the small cafes of the "Square" during certain hours of "truant"
A word about the district "Square" downtown, so called because bounded by four streets, and privileged place in student life and festive town cinemas, cafes, nightclubs, shops: the place where fun and where you had to be seen, and even now elsewhere.
The school ended, I did my graduate studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Street near Sohet Guillemins. Not really a taste (my parents love me prevented from studies that pleased me the most (horticulture or art history and archeology) for obscure reasons not well founded, but ..... simply because Mahmoud was listed!
Yet I have never liked the trade, but do not we do for love!
And that this will end my life in my city. Because, very soon I'm going marry and follow my husband in Tunis.
But my roots are deeply embedded in my native vile, and I feel an almost physical need to return each year and more, taking the age.
And, ironically, after leaving the district Fétinne, very young, that's when I go back every year now .....
After Mom died (too young unfortunately) my father sold the house in the Avenue de l'Observatoire to buy an apartment Mativa Quay, in the neighborhood of my childhood. the Vennes!
The dock is located along the derivation of the Meuse opposite the Parc de la Boverie, where I spent so many good times ...
My sister bought an apartment on the same platform, and when Dad died too, my son who occupies it, and my grandchildren in the eyes of the park or wooded view their mother grnad spent part of his youth.
is always with great joy and great emotion that I find these places so loved during my stay in Belgium.
Over the years, much has changed in my city of course (not always good for that matter) but I feel every time I come back from never having left and to find traces of my footsteps when I strode into my childhood and youth. I myself
"repromène" with always a pleasure, especially along the banks of the Meuse, because for me, a city divided by a great river has a soul that others do not.
The comings and goings of barges, the lapping of water against the banks, the reflection of sunlight on the waves that agitate all this gives life to the city.
And again, it contains a very important artistic heritage and reclaimed in many places abandoned and finally restored and rehabilitated, as I discovered yet!
Because when I lived there, I was young, I had neither the time nor the inclination to wander around, and I finally knew very little, since it was at home, school, home (almost metro, boulot, dodo!).
And when one is at the top of the hills surrounding the city, What panorama!
You will understand, I think, like Cork and I could go on much longer .....
NB: I want to say that the intelligence specific enough on certain streets of Liege, I found them in the work of Theodore Gobert "Liège through the ages" (11 volumes) .
