Glimpses of Home

When we first arrived, we stayed the lab's guest house for two weeks--we were grateful to have a free place while we looked for an apartment, even if while we were grocery shopping on a Friday night (to bring some food in the room), I looked at the parents pushing carts full of groceries--and sometimes little kids--and wondered when we would be able to feel at home...But judge for yourselves: a place that has a mini-cyclotron in the lobby can only be so "homey"...There are limits to warm, cozy feelings.



We thus decided to use our "Do not disturb" sign regularly as a multipurpose implied message: "The room is too full of suitcases to even try to walk around them with a vacuum;" "We are fine sleeping in the same sheets several days in a row;" "You (the room service lady) could also use a break;" ... and "A place becomes a bit more homey when one does not have another person enter regularly to change the towels."


Carrefour was our source of bread, pate and Nutella for the time at the Guest House ... and the occasional yogurt, tomatoes and peppers. Yes, we felt like we need to pay some token attention to nutrition principles and vegetables...


But then we got help from wonderful people at the lab to pick up the furniture in many heavy boxes and start assambling it over a period of a few days ... Why so slow? Well, tools were part of the issue, as well as a missing part and a couple of drops of fabrication glew in the wrong place can do that.


And yet all is forgotten when you can finally behold the fruit of your labor and enjoy a minimalistic design in warm colors. Back in our other home, I longed for space and less clutter. I now know that is easy to achieve: move across the world with a few suitcases only.


Unless clearly specified--in both description and rent rates--apartments here do not come with appliances. Other than the sink (and a cupboard left by the previous owners) there was nothing in the kitchen. Reading directions in French for a fridge and a stove really helped our learning curve.


And, once again, enjoying the results of minimal furnishing. Yes, if you open the fridge door, it reaches the table, but it may help if we add the detail that, when our local friends helped with the move, they kept exclaiming as they entered: "Oh, very nice...It is big and spacious!" And yes, compared with what we saw before choosing this apartment, it really is spacious.



We then moved from Nutella and pate--altough we still enjoy them, maybe too much for our own good--to more attempts to feel homey and nutritionally savvy: here is a zucchini quiche. Well, I just called it "quiche" to sound more cool and cultuarlly-aware of our French surroundings. But in all honesty, this is our friend Anny's zuccchini pie recipe, which was actually her grandmother's and she was German. So much for trying to be culturally purists with food. But still, the zucchini pie-turend-French-quiche is delicious!