Hier, Aujourd’hui et Demain, ou Le Week-end

Where are we?  What are we doing?  What bed am I waking up on?  Is it hot or cold and what language is anyone speaking? 

It is apparently autumn, sometimes 11C sometimes 14C, November, France, and language is evidement Franglais surexploitation.  We started with a meandering walk uphill to the old silk district of Lyon, La Croix-Rousse, where once upon a time many women toiled spinning silk, and although you can, today, tour an actual silk “factory” tours are “en francais seulement” so that was a no go.

We ran into the Saturday market, which stretched out over a km, produce, meat, cheese, one vendor just had Comte, young, aged, aged more, aged more again, very aged.  The neighbourhood here was mixed; old and ragged, trendy, bougie, working class, upwardly mobile, and queues everywhere, at the market stalls, out the door of butchers, for cheese, for bread.  We stopped at an outpost of Patissier Bouillet again for a taste of the exceptional vanilla flan.

As things hotted up, as the circus slash carnival which abutted the market, opened for kids, we headed back towards the centre then over to the funicular in old Lyon. [note to self: hyperlink the funicular adventures we had in Wellington, posted on this blog]  We joined a very log queue for F1, one of two funicular lines up the side of Fourviere Hill, where on top the Romans built Lugdunum in 43 BCE. [note to self: hyperlink the funicular adventures we had in Valparaiso, Chile, posted on this blog].

At the top is the Basilica.  I was chided for yesterday referring to a cathedral as a church, and reminded of the meaning (church: place of worship; basilica: associated with a nunnery or monastery; cathedral: seat of a bishop).  But here’s the thing: Tourists in Europe get churched out.  Cathedral-ed out.  Basilica-d out.  So when we got to the top I said to Stephen, go for it, I’m just going to enjoy the view.  But of course he enticed me in and it was, yes, religiously garish and outlandishly beautiful.

From there we headed down to the largest of the Lugdunum Roman Theatres, the Theatre of Fourviere.  Which is in fact not one but two, the smaller of which actually had a ceiling (!) originally.  There was a real feel of Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy (for anyone old enough to get that reference).

Afterwards we walked the funicular route [note to self, get on those hyperlinks] down to the river, stopped at a boulangerie for a bite, then continued into the centre, the peninsula, the almost an island.  We stopped at a fountain of some notoriety, and the opera house (for which, unfortunately, tours en francais seulement). 

So this guy called Bertholdi designed something called the Statue of Liberty. You may have heard of it. Anyway, that gained him some notoriety, so Bordeaux, flush with money at the time, commissioned him to create a sculpture. Bordeaux lies on one river with four tributaries, so Bertholdi designs this woman in a chariot referencing the success of the local bourgeoisie and four mythical horses (with claws it looks like) representing the tributaries. Then Bordeaux doesn’t pay up, so Bertholdi doesn’t deliver the sculpture. Lyon, however, their poo-bahs hear about the available artwork and step in and buy it. Nothing is mentioned about the significance or meaning of the damn thing.

Then Stephen decided to do the Musee des Beaux-Arts; you couldn’t offer me enough aged Comte or praline pie to look at Beaux-Arts, so we called it a truce and I went back to the hotel and watched the semi-finals of the Rolex Paris Masters.  Tennis!  In a hotel room!  While on vacation in France!  Shurely shome mishtake.

For dinner we headed out into the old city for a prix fixe meal at Cinq Mains where the food was delectable, unfortunately the lighting too dim for picture worthy posts, but especially tasty, and old Lyon was lit up beautifully on the walk home.