Lyon 1

We’ve finished our 4 weeks living in Lyon and taking a French language course at the Ecole Suisse Langue (ESL).

The Lyonnaise regard Lyon as the second biggest city in France, whereas the Marseillaise believe that it is the third biggest after them.  I think the truth is that greater Lyon is bigger than greater Marseille and has a population of about 1.5 million, whereas the actual city of Lyon is smaller than Marseille.  Once, during classes Dale referred to Lyon as the second or third biggest city in France and the teacher snapped 'the second'.

In any event Lyon is a largish city with loads of amenity.  You could say that it has everything that Paris has but on a smaller and less spectacular scale.  I think that it would probably be a very liveable city – and that certainly was our experience.

We rented a fabulous little apartment in an inner suburb that had a Fitzroy or Collingwood like vibe to it (Ed – or maybe Footscray).  It was on the 4^th floor of a 19^th century apartment building with a small courtyard.  Thankfully it had a lift for transporting all our luggage at the beginning and end of our stay. It had one bedroom, a small lounge and dining area, a kitchen, a tiny bathroom and a separate toilet. 

Home for 4 weeks

 

The only downside was that it looked onto a busy and noisy street below that hummed day and night.  There was a little takeaway pizzeria that seemed to open at about 10pm and operate until 4 am.  The pizza delivery people had annoying little motor bikes that whizzed up the street all night. 

Looking down to our street below

 

When we first arrived it was very hot and we wanted to sleep with the windows open but found this was impossible.  Fortunately our landlords, Patrick and Lolita, had invested in a little evaporative cooling fan that just managed to keep the apartment cool with all the windows closed.  Of course there was no air condition.  I imagine that it’s not really worthwhile investing in air conditioning given the few months of the year during which the city gets really hot.

After settling into our apartment over the weekend we headed off to our language classes at the ESL on Monday morning.  ESL was based in an old building on the Presqu’ile on the right hand bank of the Rhone.  It only had 6 classrooms (all based on one floor) but 3 of the class rooms had good views over the Rhone. 

View of the Rhone from the classroom

 

We enjoyed our 4 weeks at the school and feel that our French has continued to improve.  The teachers were all very nice and almost all were very very good at their job.  As we were there towards the end of summer, there were a lot of young students spending a part of their summer holidays trying to polish up their French. Some of them were not really all that interested in being there and were either absent half the time, mildly disruptive in class (on their ithingy) or disinterested. We enjoyed out last week the most because we were in a class with 6 women who were in their 20s and were all at the school because they had chosen to be there. Along the way we also met some delightful young people like Linda, from Switzerland, who spent the same 4 weeks at the school as we did.  Linda also spent 3 months in Brisbane earlier this year improving her English.  Fortunately for her she does not have a Queensland accent. I don’t really mean this – just stirring the family.  We also became friends with two young Austrian men (Adalbert and Amos), with whom we had many interesting discussions about politics.  Austria is also facing a general election on 29 September.

The school went to quite a bit of effort to organise activities each week and during the first week we visited the Musee Gadagne, which is the Lyon city museum, and went out for a wine tasting evening.  We got on very well with Pascal, who was one of the teachers, but unfortunately he left after 2 weeks because he was just helping out during the school's busy period.

 

David, Pascal and the other students

 

Julia was also in Lyon for the first week that we were there and we caught up a few times.  On one occasion I decided that I would cook chicken tarragon because Julia has cooked beautiful chicken tarragon for us a number of times including when we were in France 4 years ago.  Unfortunately it was Sunday and almost everything was closed, but by chance we discovered that the halal butchers were open, and so we gratefully bought chicken thighs and legs even though they were unboned.  So I had to de-bone a chicken for the first time.  Thank god for the world wide inter-web and YouTube, where I found an American dude with a video on de-boning chicken thighs and legs. It wasn't a complete failure because I ended up with more than enough for the meal, but the kitchen bench did resemble a killing field.  I blame the blunt knife! 

On the Friday night we had a special night out together.  We started with a couple of drinks at a peniche (which is a type of barge) moored alongside the Rhone. 

 

 

The peniche floating on the Rhone behind Julia and David

 

We followed that up with dinner at a Bouchon.  The Bouchon is a type of Lyonnaise restaurant that serves predominately meat based dishes.  The food is quite fatty and there is a lot of offal on offer.  I decided to try brains for the first time in many years.  They weren’t bad, crumbed and smothered in garlic (Ed – they were foul).

Over the weekend we also visited Les Halles Paul Bocuse, which is a covered food market set up by Paul Bocuse to sell the best produce of the region. It featured this year in Gabriel Gate's Taste le Tour when a stage of the Tour finished in Lyon.

To market to market



I never met a terrine I didn't like

 

Paul Bocuse is the French chef who the New York Times decided was the best chef of the 20^th century and he comes from Lyon.  We went to his 3 Michelin star restaurant on our last night in Lyon to celebrate our 25^th anniversary – but more of that later.  The cheese, terrines and pates were a sight to behold although we decided that we preferred the open air market at Croix Rousse that was open on Tuesdays and Saturdays. It was much cheaper and had a much wider array of fruit and vegetables.

 

We also discovered a little restaurant called Croc n Roll (not exactly a French name) that served the most extraordinary range of grilled sandwiches derived from the croque monsieur.  It wasn't  exactly Michelin star standard but the sandwiches were really yummy and filling.

Lyon is situated at the confluence of the Rhone and Saone rivers.  The Lyon city museum claims that Pittsburg is the only other city in the world to be located at the confluence of two rivers.  I found both rivers quite spectacular and the Rhone is particularly wide and blue (turquoise?) at this point, I assume because it is so close to the Alps.  The central part of the city is located on the peninsula between the two rivers.  This is called the Presqu’ile, which is one of my favourite French words because it means ‘nearly an island’ and perfectly describes a peninsula for me.   



The Presqu'ile and the Soane River from Croix Rousse

The Rhone River



Vieux (Old) Lyon is located across the Saone river and is a UNESCO World Heritage site because it has very well preserved 15^th to 17^th century buildings constructed in the Italian renaissance style and also because it is the site of the Roman city of Lugdunum.  There is an amazingly gaudy 19^th century cathedral located at the top of the hill that dominates the Lyon landscape.  We went up Forviere hill on our first full weekend in Lyon to enjoy the views

Forviere Hill (from behind), upstream of the Soane



Oh those endless steps

 

Forviere above Lyon

Basilica of Notre-Dame Forviere

The black barrel shape of the Lyon Opera building stands out on the landscape of the Presqu'il. Our apartment was just off to the left.

Cathedral St Jean-Baptiste in Vieux Lyon

Lovely park on the hill up to Forviere

Cathedral St Jean-Baptiste in Vieux Lyon

 

The other hill is called Croix Rousse and our apartment was on the slopes leading up to it.  Croix Rousse is also a UNESCO World Heritage site because the Lyon silk industry was largely based here and there are many passages (called traboules) which run between and underneath buildings.  They were used to transport silk in bad weather and also to avoid having morning slops thrown out of windows on to the silk.  We went on a school excursion to see the traboules, which wasn't very successful because the building residents weren't letting us in.  Julia went on a guided excursion, but didn’t think they were all that exciting, so we gave up hunting for traboules.  The traboules were also used extensively by the French Resistance during the 2^nd world war, which was headquartered in Lyon until it was moved to Paris late in the war.

Inside a building with a traboule





Class trip up to Croix Rousse

 

We also went across the Rhone river to see Parc Tete d’Or , which is about the size of Melbourne’s botanical gardens, has a big lake in the middle and also has a good running track. It was one of the first public gardens set up in France and was opened at the same time as Central Park in New York.

 

Pretty Parc Tete D'or

 

During the second week, our classes were held in the afternoon which had the potential to be a shock to the system but we actually enjoyed sleeping in a bit and we made good use of our free mornings.  We did an excursion to the Musee Beaux Arts with the school and visited the Museum of fabrics and decorative arts by ourselves.  The Musee Beaux Arts is small in comparison to museums in London, Paris and New York but still has an impressive collection that is well presented.  We particularly liked the sculptures and antiquities that were on display.

On the Thursday night we played Laser Tag, which was organised by the school.  It was a lot of fun but very hot and I think I spent the last 5 minutes too exhausted to shoot anyone or avoid being shot. 

We were divided into 3 teams, and Marion the teacher (bottom left) went solo.  Little did we realise that Marion was like Lara Croft, and she scored 3 times more points than the next highest player

 

After laser tag we met up with some of our school friends who were leaving after 2 weeks.  The impact of coming out of the boiling hot laser tag, racing home to have showers and then riding bikes down to the restaurant for dinner, resulted in Dale getting a pretty bad cold that he has only just got over.

 

Dinner afterwards with Josephine, Linda, Amos, Lukas Adalbert and David

 

Lyon has the same city bike hire system as Melbourne except that there are sooooooooo many more bikes and bike stations (345 stations!).  Come on Melbourne – this is how you make a bike hire system work.  Having said that I did have some gripes about Lyon’s system.  Firstly it is quite old because it was one the first that was established.  This means that you need to spend an inordinate amount logging in at bike stations to hire bikes and successfully re-docking the bikes was a nightmare.  We also discovered that it was very difficult to find a spare docking station anywhere near the centre of the city after 6pm. 

Next Time: More of Lyon