When I was 14-years-old I got the chance to travel to France with my family on one of my grandpa’s buying trips. He’s an antique dealer and travels to parts of Europe about once a year to buy antiques to ship back. One of papaw’s contacts, Patrice Vetu, picked us up from the airport in Paris and we drove for little over an hour to the town of Rouen. It’s a small French town where Patrice lived and worked. Our bags were still in the car as we pulled up to a massive, somewhat run down, warehouse in a rural area on the outskirts of Rouen. Papaw didn’t want to wait to see Patrice’s inventory, so this was our first stop. We all walked into the warehouse that was full of Patrice’s antique furniture. Papaw and my parents went straight to work looking for pieces they wanted to buy while my brother and I were free to explore.
The weathered exterior of the warehouse was deceiving. The inside was three stories of thick concrete floors supported by large concrete columns. The staircases on each corner of the rectangle building were solid concrete that had held up quite well throughout the years. I was awestruck by the enormity of the place. It looked better suited for manufacturing tanks than storing antique furniture.
Its scale was offset only by the extraordinary amount of graffiti that creatively covered just about every surface. I walked around studying and appreciating the anonymous artwork. Each one was different in style and size. Some of them were lettering and some were detailed images or murals, but all were very colorful. Every floor was something new. The top floor was empty of furniture but littered with hundreds of used spray paint canisters and lids, which gave me a sense of what it took to paint all the graffiti. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. I would compare it the feeling one must get when they bust open an ordinary rock to discover it is a geode.
On the second floor two large metal doors lead outside to a platform connected to a rusted fire escape. I stood out there for a moment examining the French countryside around me. It gave me a strange sensation. It was my first time in a different country. I remember looking at the aluminum siding that covered the building’s exterior. The corrugation of the tin was different from what I was familiar with back home and it reinforced the sense of unfamiliarity I was already feeling. I remember thinking how funny it was that I got culture shock from something so ordinary. The whole experience at the warehouse was totally unexpected and one of the best parts of the trip.