I met Gian-Carlo in 1976, landing in MIT trying to establish Western connections. I was already working with Marcel-Paul Schützenberger who was one of his great friends and I needed no further introduction. Moreover, the few dollars that I had in my pocket were forcing me to eat fast, and this was contrary to Gian-Carlo's sense of hospitality. The outcome was that I appeared several times on his list of professional expenses (section: restaurants). It was still an epoch in which tax inspectors readily accepted supporting combinatorics. This is no longer the case since combinatorics received the imprimatur of the Bourbaki Seminar. Let me however point out that meals were followed by long discussions about the comparative merits of algebraic structures, Gian Carlo for his part tirelessly asking me to repeat the definition of λrings that he copied each time in his black notebook with a new illustrative example.