Lyon!

Place Bellecour

So, Lyon! My dear cousin, who is known as C-SPAN in the US but goes by Christophe when in France, came to visit me for a week over my break at the end of February/beginning of March.¹ I took the train to meet him at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, and we caught a train² right after that to head to Lyon!

We were slightly confused by the metro/tram/bus system when we arrived (too many options!!), but we figured it out and got to the hotel, which was right next to a delicious bakery and like two minutes from the metro station. Then we headed downtown, to the main square Place Bellecour. So pretty!!! It’s a huge open square, kind of like Quinconces in Bordeaux, except surrounded by shopping and restaurant streets on all sides. There’s a huge Ferris wheel and a lion. Okay, not a real live lion, but a giant red silhouette. So cool!! I think sometimes, they have letters out that spell out “ONLY LYON,”³ but we just saw the lion. We didn’t have a map yet, so we just walked around on the different side streets and found the river and this cool sculpture of a tree with giant flowers. Back in February, it still got dark super early, so we walked around and looked at all the buildings and bridges lit up at night. The buildings in Lyon were that beautiful stone architecture that’s everywhere in France. I think it will be weird⁴ to go back to the US and have all the downtown buildings looks so modern.

The flower tree!

Painted lion outside of Chez M'man - maybe lions like this are Lyon's version of San Francisco's hearts?

Saône River

We got dinner at Chez M’man, a delicious restaurant my friend Sam recommended. She studied in Lyon last year, so she gave us all the insider tips! Merci beaucoup, Sam! I had macaroni and cheese and pork. I don’t know how typically French it was, but it was délicieux!!!

The next morning, we grabbed croissants at the boulangerie next to our hotel and headed out for some whirlwind sightseeing. It was cold but sunny. We stopped by Place Bellecour again and got a map from the Office de Tourisme. Then, we took quite the hike⁷ up to the Basilique Notre-Dame de Fourvière which is all the way up on a hillside overlooking the rest of Lyon. By the end, I was barely crawling, but the view was amazing!

The Basilique Notre-Dame de Fourvière was also very cool. I forgot it was Sunday morning, and we walked in as a mass was ending, so it was kind of awkward to take many photos inside.

Heading back down, we took a different route, and stopped at the (partially restored) ruins of an old Roman amphitheater. I told Christophe that with some careful cropping, he could tell people he went to Rome and the Colosseum too! It was not quite as grand as the Colosseum in Rome (but really, what is??), but you could climb all over them, which was fun.

Eventually, we made it all the way back down and walked along the river, where we saw this awesome pedestrian bridge, the Passerelle du Palais de Justice! I thought the one column suspension design was really interesting, especially since said column is all the way to the side instead of in the center. The design and the color and the beautiful weather all made the scene very striking, and I took a tonnnn of photos.

Passerelle du Palais de Justice

 Next, we headed to the Musée des Beaux Arts (Museum of Fine Arts), another recommendation from Sam! (Actually, pretty much everything we did was recommended by Sam!) There were a lot of really cool sculptures and paintings there, including some by Monet and Renoir. It’s always awesome to see paintings by people you learned about in school in real life.

Fontaine Bartholdi outside the Musée des Beaux-Arts

Musée des Beaux-Arts at the Place des Terreaux

After the museum, we went to the Parc de la Tête d’Or, which is a huge open park that turns right into a public zoo. (Free admission! Well actually, no admission since it’s just part of the park. Cray-cray!) The park was really pretty and filled with families and kids playing, picnicking, and strolling around on a Sunday afternoon. Most of the animals in the zoo part weren’t outside since it was pretty cold, but Christophe did see a giraffe for the first time!⁸ When we left the park, we also saw a building that looked like a spaceship.

Spaceship.

Nomnomnomnomnomnom

After a long walk back to the hotel and resting our feet for a while, we headed out to Lolo Quoi, an Italian restaurant, for dinner.⁹ I got this delicious pasta with chunks of cheese and roasted vegetables and pine nuts in it, and it was so so so so so so good. However, I had to wait for-freaking-ever to eat it because I am oh-so polite as to wait for everyone to be served, and someone had to exaggerate their aversion to pine nuts all the way to telling the waiter he was allergic, so that when the waiter accidentally brought his pasta with pine nuts on top, the whole thing had to be taken back to the kitchen and remade. Couldn’t just pick them off instead of complaining… -_______- East-coasters can be so high-maintenance.

The next morning, we got up and caught the train to the city of unparalleled delicious chocolates and $5 cans of Coca-Cola: Geneva! À bientôt!

1. I really still don’t know what to call that break. It’s not winter break, because that’s over Christmas, and it’s not spring break because that’s right now. I guess the French just have so many breaks, Americans don’t know what to call them!

2. There is a train station right in the airport.
3. SEE WHAT THEY DID THERE

4.  And maybe a little depressing.⁵

5.  Not depressing however, at school. Quite frankly, the buildings at the fac⁶ here look like they were built in the 60’s and have had no maintenance done since then. It’s not attractive. I miss all the modern, state-of-the art buildings at UCSD. I wouldn’t describe them as “pretty” the way I would the historic stone buildings here, but they are cool-looking in a different way. Also there’s a house on one of them now!!!

6. “Fac” is short for “faculté” and means university campus. Yes, it sounds like the F-bomb.

7.  The hike was made longer by the fact that we got lost like 5 billion times. For some reason, the Office de Tourisme chose not to mark the names of the roads around one of their major tourist sites on the map they give to tourists. Also, Christophe, despite coming from a family of cartographers, did not feel the need to trouble himself with the map.

8.  Apparently there are no zoos in Maine. Wut.

9.  Merci encore Sam! Also, Lyon is close-ish to the Italian border, so it’s totally justified that we were eating Italian food in France. Also it was vachement délicieux (hella delicious).