Lunch with our Landlords - Past and Present

Other than two brief stops early on, we have always stayed in the same apartment in Lyon.  David found it online through Craig’s List France back in 2010 when we were looking for a place to call home for a year.  He negotiated our year-long contract with then landlady, Dominique, totally online.  A huge leap of faith for both of them!

Our apartment is the left two windows on
the 5th floor (American) / 4th floor (French)

We have come to think of it as “our apartment.”  It’s comfortably furnished and includes pretty much everything we need down to linens and kitchen utensils.  Over time David has done some minor repair work, we’ve purchased a few things for the apartment, and, in turn, we are able to store some things in the basement.  (Think wine.) It’s definitely a second home to us.

Also, Dominique and Roger, her husband, have become good friends of ours.  Roger and David are in what Anna calls the “Male-Bonding Bike Group” – the group of four men that makes annual 4-5 day bike trips.  And, we often get together with Roger and Dominique socially. So you can imagine our shock when Dominique and Roger sold “our apartment”! 

Fortunately, our new landlords, Stephane and Nathalie, are also very nice people and have become friends.  Among other things, we have found we share a love of jazz with Stephane, who plays jazz piano in his “spare time”.  In the course of getting to know them and their charming daughters, Lucie and Fanny, we have enjoyed meals with them at their home, at our apartment, and, most recently, at Roger and Dominique’s.  Roger’s Osso Buco was excellent, and he put the girls to work stirring the risotto which was also delicious.

Enjoying the cheese course. (Roger is taking the picture.)

After dinner we were treated to a recap of Stephane and Nathalie’s recent family trip to the US to see the eclipse and do some other sightseeing.  (We gave the girls sheets of the special issue US Eclipse Stamps and that are heat-sensitive and can show the details of the moon in front of the sun.)  We definitely enjoyed hearing about their favorite places on the trip and other tidbits. 

Great food, great conversations, and fun people to share it all with…we are, indeed, fortunate to have such super past and present landlords for “our apartment.”