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The second best thing after EVS is an EVS meeting. Since the golden time when we were all happily living in glorious Slovenske Konjice (SLO) sharing the same chaotic apartment, we had few “EVS meetings” such as for a summer holiday in Sardinia (2009) and to celebrate new year’s eve in Rome (2010) and in Ljubljana (2011). Three of us also spent a spring break in Sardinia in 2011 and I’ve met all my EVS friends who stopped in Turin or nearby in the last couple of years. This time our NYE plans seemed impossible to overlap, but I didn’t want to miss my yearly appointment with the EVS gang so I decided to stop in Lille on my way to London, ‘cause Lille is the town with the highest concentration of my EVS housemates.
I was flattered by the warm welcome I received, we all met both days I’ve spent there, the first evening chatting, laughing, gossiping and catching up in a local pub drinking Ch’ti (the local beer) and the second day sightseeing in the old part of the town, the part that long time ago was an island (hence the name of the town), with its precious buildings made of bricks and stones and the roofs with the shape of stairs, and I loved that kind of sensation between realizing how much you do miss somebody you don’t see since long time and the warm confidence of being around each other as if we still were sharing our daily life together. We visited the main square, the old stock market, a statue of a mother and a child that my friends claimed being very important (but I’m still a bit suspicious they were making a fool of me ;-) ) and had a walk until the canal. Like Turin, Lille is restyling itself trying to overcome the status of grey town of the north; it claims an active cultural life, which I didn’t have the time to enjoy being there just a couple of days, but if it is anything like the only band I know from Lille’s music scene (“Dubians”, one of my favourite band ever!) I don’t find it hard to believe!
