Sunday 16 October 2011

Bread and Keys


The day came (finally) to exchange the keys for our new apartment in Rue Musette. I call it an apartment because it wasn’t really a unit (too old for that) and it wasn’t really a flat (it wasn’t flat - the floor was a bit not level in places!) so it was an apartment. In French they shorten the French l’appartement to l'apparte so that's what I'll do too. And it was our dream apparte. It was tops! We moved in as soon as it was legally ours and began to make it our home.

We did find some minor problems with l’apparte but they paled when we thought about living at the fac. There were a couple of leaky taps and gurgling frog-like sounds that came up from the bath drain. The plumber who gives quotes came to see about making a quote to give to the landlord to see if he’d ok the fixing of the leaks for the quoted price, after which time he would call us to make an appointment for the plumber who fixes things to come and fix things. So the leaks got fixed eventually. Ah the French! But the frog lived with us for almost the whole 14 months we were there (mysteriously disappearing after we finally tried frogs’ legs at a local restaurant)!

The markets woke us up on our first morning but we soon learned to close the windows on the nights before market days. We could people-gaze from our bedroom windows! And our windows had shutters (a strange concept coming from Sydney where shutters are pieces of wood nailed to the sides of windows to give the appearance of having shutters). Real proper French shutters! Cool - or as they say in French - supercool! (I learned that saying quite easily - I wonder why?!)

The apparte was located above a very poor-quality chain bread shop called Point Chaud, but no matter how bad the final product seemed to be, the smells of chocolate, butter and pastry, creeping up from the ovens were absolutely divine (and enough to destroy the strongest person’s diet!). Also very warm and welcoming when leaving for work early on winter mornings. When it came to choice of bread shops nearby, there were many. And we tried most of them before deciding on making one of them our local. It wasn’t the closest but it worth the extra 50 metres in walking (walk off the bread). It had scrumptious baguettes and bread loaves that didn’t go hard and inedible after 2 days like the ones we’d been buying at the fac. This bread shop used fresh dough every day, which really made a difference in the end. It also had variety, not just the usual baguettes and patisserie selection that other bread shops provided. 

And the ladies who worked there, obviously sisters, were charming. When Michael’s parents came for a visit in October, we told the bread shop ladies that they would be coming in to buy our bread but that they didn’t speak French. The ladies were happy to oblige and Michael’s parents commented on how friendly and helpful they had been. It probably wasn’t the best bakery in Dijon but it was all we needed in a bread shop. 

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