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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