I love market days.  For all of you who might not know, small and large markets with fresh produce, meats, cheese, and anything else you can dream up are a huge thing in France.  I can walk back and forth through the market for hours.  The closest market for us is just a couple of blocks away along the Saone River.  The market is open every morning until 12:30pm except for Mondays and on Sundays there is also crafts and beautiful local art on the other side of the bridge.

Here are just a few things we’ve gotten at the market since we’ve bee in Lyon: tomatoes, avocadoes, potatoes, paella, cheese, fresh pasta, rotisserie chicken, baguettes, cherries, fresh flowers, and sausages.

One of my favorite parts about the market is that everything is fresh. French people shop for food daily and so when you go to the market everything is ready to be eaten within in a couple of days.  I love it!  Typically when you go to a grocery store the food isn’t always ripe and ready to be eaten. Often times you have to wait a few days for your produce to ripen.  And I don’t know about you, but with some fruits and vegetables I don’t even know when the “right” time is to eat them. Well, at the market the wonderful people selling their produce are able to pick out the best produce, cheese, meats, etc. for you.

We’ve been asked many questions about our trip to France and how we planned it all out.  I thought it would be fun to answer some of the questions people have been asking us about living somewhere else for a month. First, here are some of the questions people have been asking: How did you decide to live and work somewhere else for a month? How did you choose Lyon, France? Can you really work from another country? You’re not really working, are you?

First, how did we decide to live and work from somewhere else for a month?  If you know us, then you know that we love to travel, eat, drink, and experience new things in general.  It doesn’t hurt that I teach and get most of the summer off while Dusty runs a business where he can and does often work remotely.  For the past three summers I’ve been taking classes for my Ph.D. and we haven’t gotten to travel as much as we wanted.  I’ve finished my course work so we thought we’d try living somewhere else for a month.  We started brainstorming and came up with things like, Colorado, some type of beach, and California.  After a while we asked ourselves why we weren’t thinking of traveling outside of the U.S.  Then we started to brainstorm what countries might work.  Really, our only guidelines for choosing a location were that it had a good internet connection so we both could work! 

Somehow we chose France, maybe it was because five years ago Dusty proposed to in France or that I speak a little (I mean very little) French or maybe it was just that we thought there were plenty of sights to be seen in the country.  After talking with several friends who had lived and studied in France as well as researched the country we decided Paris was out of the running because it was too big and just too touristy, and we’ve already been there.  We chose Lyon because it was big enough, we’re totally city people, it looked like there were plenty of places to rent for a month, there were quite a few things to do in and around the city, and it’s the food capital of France (and we like food).

And that’s how we chose Lyon as our home for the month of June.