Twenty-eight years ago this summer, my parents hosted an exchange student, Corrine, from France for several months.

We were fortunate to be able to visit her in her hometown the following year when my grandma took my mom, brother, cousin, and I to Europe. Here is a picture of Corrine with her mom and dad taken during our visit them in Villers-Cotterets, France in 1981.

We stayed in touch with Corrine for quite a few years, but back then it was more difficult to do because we didn’t have email, Skype, and Facebook like we do now. The last letter I received from her was almost 24 years ago.

When we decided to take this trip to Europe I wondered what the chances would be of ever finding her again which led me on a hunt to find her. I searched the records of her home town, but couldn’t find anyone by that name. I searched in Paris and found lots of people with her name. I even decided to join Facebook to see if I could find her via the social networking site (now you know what finally made me decide to give FB a try).

After searching for about a month I was ready to give up. In one last effort to find any clues that might lead me to her, I reread all of the letters we had received from her over the years paying particular attention to any clues which might be found in the last few letters. One of the last letters included a very short sentence which said she was designing cross-stitch patterns (which she said wasn’t particularly enjoyable) on the side while she finished school.

I figured searching for cross-stitch designers would most likely be a dead end especially since it didn’t appear to be what she planned to continue, but I decided to give the search for her one last try. I was *completely* AMAZED when google came up with a cross-stitch designer by her name. I’m not listing it here because I don’t know how she feels about me posting her full name on my blog. I had to do quite a bit more searching to find a book which carried her patterns. More searching turned up a store in Paris which carried the book and some of her patterns. I emailed the store (hoping someone there read English) to explain the situation and asked if they knew whether she was the person I was searching for or not. I was hopeful because her bio stated she lived in North America for a time.

After not hearing anything for 5-6 weeks, I figured it had been just another dead end. However, one day I woke to an email from her says, “Yes. It is me.” She updated me on her family. Her father passed away last year and her mother moved to another town. She is living in Paris, is a designer, and works in a small botique. She emailed us some helpful information regarding our visit to Paris and made plans to leave directions to her apartment at our hotel the day before we arrive. We’ve gave her our itinerary and she gave us her work schedule.

When we arrived at our hotel in Paris, the clerk told us our friend had been there to drop off some maps and information as well as her phone number with instructions to call her as soon as we arrived. The clerk tried to phone her, but there was something mixed up with the phone number and we weren’t able to get through. However, about a 1/2 hour later Corrine showed up at our apartment. It was WONDERFUL to see her again after all these years. I was able to tell her the above story of tracking her down which she also found amazing and she thanked me several times for finding her. I thought I had someone take a picture of us together, but I’m not finding one in the files. Maybe I was thinking we would get one the next day, but you’ll read later that we never connected again.

Her apartment was only a few minutes walk from our hotel so we followed her there. Here is her street which is a typical one in this area.

I guess I didn’t get a picture of the outside door leading into her apartment’s main entrance area, but if you look closely at some of the doors on the ground floor in this picture you’ll be able to see basically what it looked like. It was a big heavy door with a push button pad for entering the security code. Behind the gate was this BEAUTIFUL community garden area where everyone keeps their bikes. Here is Corrine beside her bicycle.

In addition to the coffee and tea, Corrine also served us a WONDERFUL plum pie which she made for us.

Michaela is an architecture student so she really enjoyed seeing all of the various buildings in Paris.

We made plans to meet Corrine tomorrow, but unfortunately, when we arrived at her shop it was closed. We left a note for her, but didn’t find out until later that she didn’t receive it until it was too late to connect with us. She left a note at our hotel stating her boss decided to close the shop on Sunday. She tried to meet us at our hotel, but we had already left for the day so then she tried to search us out at Notre Dame, various lunch places around the hotel, etc. but as you can imagine it would be hard to find someone in a city this size. Here is Amanda peeking in the window for the shop where Corrine works which is where we were supposed to meet.
We had a very nice visit. Corrine’s English was quite understandable even though she had said in the email that she didn’t think it was that good. She said that part of her job at the boutique is to speak with the English customers so she must be getting a lot of practice.

I hope that we will be able to stay in touch now by email for many years to come!