My sit spot is the garden of my host family in Aix-en-Provence, France. Aix is a very small city, and it’s just like any other small French city—accessible by foot and close to nature. My house is located in the north of Aix, just 20 minutes walk from the city center. There is a big slope walking from the city center back to home. While climbing up the slope everyday, multi-story buildings start to disappear, and small houses with cute gardens take over the view. You will find the house of my host family between Chemin du Pin and Traverse Saint-Joseph. It’s a two-story house beautifully constructed in the typical Southern French style.

When I close my eyes and sit on the beach-styled lounge chair in the garden, everything starts to calm down. I can feel the warmth of sunshine and the refreshing yet warm breeze strokes my face. Cities along the Mediterranean coast in the South of France get over 300 days of sunshine on average per year, and the perfect balance of humidity and dryness in the spring just keeps everything so lovely. I love being under the sun; sometimes I feel like I’m photosynthesizing like a plant. I like to feel my hair and my cheeks slowly heating up under the sun. I smell the many beautiful plants in the garden, the sweet scent of flowers and combined with the earthy odor of the soil, among which the most outstanding one is the scent from this tree called mimosa. It’s a kind of tree that only blossoms shortly in the winter. Before coming here, I only knew mimosa as a cocktail, but this tree that’s native to Southern Europe is breathtakingly beautiful.