Not a lot of people know of Tours, a city in central France between two rivers. I moved to Tours for my masters in urban planning without knowing what to expect. I'd studied French previously and in my language classes, we would always talk about making a group trip to France. The plan never materialised. A few years later, the opportunity to spend a fully-funded year in France presented itself and I said 'Why not?'. I caught a flight, went to Paris, took a TGV and arrived at Tours. It was a long day fraught with misunderstanding and nervousness about a language I hadn't practised in seven years.
I had only ever lived in Chennai which is fairly large and urban with a population of around 4.5 million with box-like buildings everywhere. In Tours, it is possible to cycle from one end of the agglo to another in half an hour and it's population is 134,978. The buildings were all small, built in tuffeau, castles dotted the region and most of the city was sandwiched between two rivers - the Loire and the Cher.
It was this small scale that made me fall in love with Tours immediately but it took me a while to get used to the French way of life. I didn't call it home in the beginning. I don't know when the transition happened. But somewhere along the way, I started referring to my small room as home.
Maybe it was because studying urban planning exposed me to facets of the city that I would not otherwise know. Maybe it was when, I could, at some point of time, take visitors around and give them a tour. Maybe it was when I could tell friends little things that they didn't know about the city yet. Maybe it was when I could cycle everywhere without looking at a map. Maybe it was all the really friendly people who broke all French stereotypes of being rude. Maybe it when I learnt to canoe on the Cher and bathe in the Loire. Maybe it was when I helped friends paint and move into their new houses.
The moment that is stuck in my head though is when I came back from a trip and getting out at the station made me smile and feel like I was home. In the time that followed, this warm feeling would wash over me everytime I arrived at the station, so much so, that even coming back from Paris felt like coming home. Tours was my European anchor.
Over time, I would go on to make some of the most memorable experiences in and around Tours. Once, I was at the museum with a friend and when we were asked which department we were from, my friend replied for both of us '37'. It was true, I did feel like I hailed from 37. No questions asked, just a smile and an 'enjoy yourself' after. Demonyms in France are a real thing - the people of each city are called something and they take great pride in it. Paris has parisiens and parisiennes. Lyon has the lyonnais. Strasbourg has the strasbourgeois. And then there's the plain weird ones like the pictaviens from Poitiers and my personal favourite the bordelais from Bordeaux. In Tours, we're Tourangeaux. I don't know when it happened but Tours adopted me as it's very own Tourangelle.
