France 3

We’re currently staying in an apartment/hotel in a little village east of Lyon called Marcy l’Etoile. That’s Marcy the Star. I don’t know the history behind the name. We are kitty-corner from the park I mentioned before. You can view this Google map with us, the airport and Itasca France marked on it. I put the marker for Chez Russell exactly on the building we are staying in. Aren't satellite maps amazing?

Marcy has the requisite bakery, pharmacy, pizzeria, grocery and hair salon. They’re within walking-distance, as is the little park and tot lot in the center of town. The population of Marcy is about 3000. Everything closes from 12:30 to 3pm each day and all day on Sundays and holidays. This is somewhat less the case in Lyon. People have been pleasant and patient with us in all of our interactions.

I’ve had few opportunities to try to converse with people in French. Our friends from Itasca speak English, and our adventures haven’t turned up many people interested in having slow and difficult conversations with me. I have, with varying degrees of success, shopped, read signs, apologized and responded to compliments on my children. One of my more successful encounters was asking for salt at the grocery, one of the less successful was buying what I thought was lotion and having it turn out to be very pleasantly scented soap. Emory has not progressed beyond the hello, please and thank you he knew when we arrived, though he enjoys using those.

France has, we’ve been told, recently climbed enthusiastically on the paranoia bandwagon, so the playgrounds we’ve encountered here have no swings and few climbing structures. Some seem to have had most of their equipment removed and nothing has been added to replace it. Picture a large rectangle of gravel, with four benches on the four sides, one small slide near one corner and one springy ride-on animal near the opposite corner and nothing in the middle. That is one of Ecully’s parks (David’s office is in Ecully). Marcy’s park is better off than that – it has a small slide and a largish web-like, rope climbing structure. We tend to visit the playgrounds during the afternoon and have generally not met many other children there. Public education begins at three here, and sometimes as early as two years old.

Our hotel is new construction. In many ways, it’s similar to American new construction, but in a few ways it’s quite different. Ceramic tile is used everywhere, which I love. Our living area and kitchen are tiled, as are the toilet rooms, the bathroom floors and the walls of the shower. The toilet room and the bathroom are separate, and there is a second toilet room downstairs (which unnerves me because the nearest sink for hand washing is the kitchen sink and I don’t like the idea of washing toilet hands in the dish sink – call me crazy, David does all the time). There are thick plastic shades that can be drawn down the outside of the windows. Think shutters done the style of horizontal blinds. All houses here seem to have some kind of outside window cover. The doors do not fit entirely inside the doorframe; the one side of the door is about 3cm (trying to use local units) larger than the doorframe and is attached to the second part of the door that fits inside the frame. The upstairs is carpeted with short Berber carpet, which our friends say is the standard in cheap floor covering here.

Emory has found a friend in our neighbor Marat, who is five-years-old. His mother is here on sabbatical for a year. They arrived last June and he and his two older sisters (eight and ten) attended the local school this year. They are from Quebec and speak both French and English, which is wonderful for Mo.