Our first
dispatch sat on the shelf for a few weeks while we completed our
preparations. I’ll bring the story up to
date quickly. Imagine Becky and me moving
in that familiar herky-jerky fast-forward manner, and be grateful you can skip
the ads.
When last
spotted, we were relieved that our St. Louis house was under contract. With things proceeding quickly, we moved up
our departure date to July 23. Daughter
Lisa flew in from Boston to provide invaluable packing help. The movers picked up our household goods on
June 12 and put them into a storage unit, and we closed the sale on June 14.
Homeless! For the next five weeks, we would, as our son
Garner said with amusement, throw ourselves “on the mercy of family and
friends.” We spent two weeks with
Becky’s mother at her home in suburban Chicago (leaving one of our cars in her
garage), visited our daughter Sarah at the University of Virginia, and spent
time in North Carolina and Williamsburg, VA.
During our time
with Becky’s mom we presented ourselves at the French consulate in downtown
Chicago to apply for the long-term visas that would enable us to stay in France
for more than 90 days. Our first
encounter with the infamous French bureaucracy.
It took a week and a regular exchange of emails with attachments to
persuade the consular officials that we had sufficient means and health insurance
to avoid becoming burdens on the French social-welfare system, but at last the
visas were issued.
On July 23,
after leaving our second car at a long-term storage facility in Virginia, we
arrived at Dulles airport to catch our Icelandair flight to Paris via Reykjavik.
We landed
at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris about 1:00 p.m. on July 24, hauled our
bags to the adjoining train station, and caught a high-speed TGV train to
Lyon. Arriving at the apartment shortly
after 6:00 p.m., we were greeted by Madame Marie-Noell Decoret, the woman with
whom we’d had a two-month email exchange about leasing the unit. Marie-Noell is a cheerful woman whose English
is fairly good but can be unwittingly comical. She showed us the second floor
apartment, explained how some of the unfamiliar French appliances work, handed
us the keys, and said “Au revoir.” Becky
and I looked at each other and said, “Bienvenue!”
First Impressions
Our
apartment is located in a nondescript but tidy residential neighborhood in the
Part-Dieu section of Lyon, west of the Rhone River. It is to Lyon what Queens is to New York
City. There are shops, restaurants, and
subway and tramway stops within a short walk of our front door. Even in a plain-vanilla neighborhood like
this, we are constantly being surprised as we turn a corner and see several lovely
buildings with the classic French mansard roofs with gables and intricate design
elements. As throughout Lyon and many cities in France, the larger avenues are shaded by rows of stately plane trees.
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| Our quartier (neighborhood). |
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| Nearest Metro stop. |
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| Our local Marche Franprix (groceries). |
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| The corner boulangerie, Maison Drap. |
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| Maison Drap baker. |
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| Maison Drap staff. |
Our
apartment is compact but serviceable.
The single bedroom overlooks a courtyard behind our building, and the
sitting/dining room is at the front, overlooking the street. The bathroom (good shower!) and a separate
toilette branch off the narrow hall that connects the main rooms. A kitchen alcove extends off the sitting
room, with a countertop oven, a two-burner induction cooking unit, and a
dishwasher. A wall-mounted TV faces the
sofa in the sitting room. Large, almost
ceiling-to-floor windows open in each of the main rooms, allowing good
ventilation (no screens, but insects haven’t been a problem).
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| Sitting room with dining/work table |
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| Kitchen alcove. |
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| Our bedroom. |
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| Hallway viewed from front room. |
A first-day
overview of Lyon from the top deck of a tour bus revealed majestic public
buildings, lovely museums and art venues, smart shopping districts, and
graceful bridges that span the Rhone and Saone rivers, which converge
here. With excitement we’ve started to
explore the city and its diverse elements and will report back soon.