Lyon, and Hills, and Sights, Oh My!

 

Welcome to Lyon! We had such a wonderful time exploring Lyon, despite our short time available. Lyon is a beautiful city with amazing old buildings situation next to beautiful modern buildings. 

We decided to walk from the train station to the metro station where we were to meet our couch surfing host. It was a picturesque day for a walk along the rivers. It did end up being quite a long walk up some serious hills. Lyon is fairly close to the Alps, in fact, you can see them in the distance! So, around the rivers, the town is pretty flat…but let’s just say we worked out our leg muscles on this walk!

 

We discovered a pedestrian bridge; from the way it felt as we walked across, I would guess that it was a suspension bridge. 

 We ended up visiting a couple of museums on our second day in Lyon. The first was Musee Miniature et Cinema, which was really cool. We took a ton of pictures, but I don’t have the patience to upload any more photos with this slow internet connection. The museum displayed props, costumes, sets, and miniature sets that were used a wide variety of movies – mostly American movies and TV. For example, a robot from iRobot was there and so was the idol from Indiana Jones. It was super fun. Plus they had two floors dedicated to miniature sets that were used during special effects scenes. Just fascinating. 

We also went to the Musee Lumiere. We had to get off at the Monplaisir metro stop – it has nearly the same name as our friend Henry, so we of course had to go! 🙂 

 

The Lumiere museum was actual a very large house that the family Lumiere built. The Lumiere family are credited with building the first cinematograph and basically inventing videos. Pretty cool. The museum had their first cinematograph there as well as Thomas Edison’s kinetiscope, which could record video really well, but it was kind of awkward to watch videos, as I’m doing in the picture below.

 

We enjoyed ice cream at Nardone, which was recommended by our couch surfer host. Martin had the ginger and I had the vanilla. His ginger was the strongest ginger ice cream I’ve ever had! Fantastic! The vanilla had a great flavor, but the texture wasn’t as smooth or creamy as I had expected.

 

For dinner, I had the Salade Lyonnaise – the traditional salad of the city – minus the bacon. 🙂 The poached egg was fantastic and the salad dressing was light and spicy. Perfect.

 

We would see bagnats all over the place – in shops and people’s hands as they are walking around. They are THE portable food in France. It is basically a submarine sandwich, delivered in a handy bag so as to catch anything that may fall out and so that your grimy hands don’t touch your food. Most have meat, but some are vegetarian. In this photo, I am enjoying a bagnat while waiting to see which platform our train will be on. 

 

The Romans built a theatre in Lyon around 15 BC and it is now the oldest in all of France! The lower part is still used for performances, but when the Romans used it, nearly 11,000 people could sit in it! It was amazing and deceptive in its size. In the picture below, Martin is standing on the stairs toward the right-hand side of the photo. Just amazing!

 

Both days we discovered Lyon, we had our luggage with us. They are fairly easy to move around, except when stairs are around or going up hill, which it seems like we are perpetually doing. In the picture below, I was already huffing and puffing going up this very steep hill and we were just at the very bottom still (although, I thought we were nearly half way up…)

 

Fortunately, we got to walk down these stairs – at least 7 flights.

 

While walking up hills (or taking the metro, once we discovered the train that would take us up the hill), I would just remind myself that a breathtaking view awaits my breathless arrival. 

We were never disappointed.

 

Today, we began our adventure in Nice. We are staying at a hostel just 5 minutes walking from the beach, where we spent most of our time today. I’ll try to post some about Nice tomorrow. For now: Au revoir!