I woke up with the intention of being a good tourist, using as my support the Hop Off- Hop On tourist bus that drives in a loop from one point of interest to the next. Lyon is of course a very large city that grew from a starting point at the confluence of the large Rhône river and the smaller Saône. The rivers run parallel to each other for a couple of kilometers before joining, and the land in between is called Presqu'ile (meaning "almost island", although in reality is a skinny peninsula). This is where the chic district of the city is located, with all the big and famous fashion stores. The Saône is deflected to parallel the Rhône by a tall bluff, at the foot of which is located Vieux Lyon, which is only three streets deep parallel to the river.
The bluff was the bastion where the Roman city of Lugdunum was founded, as the most important province of the territory called Gaulle. There are two Roman forums, the little and the big one, but I was unable to visit them because even though the day was hot and clear there was an advisory for a storm (the storm did happen at night, and it was a particularly intense one), although I couldn't see a relation between an open archaeologic site and a storm.
Anyway, I walked to the plaza named Bellecour, in Presqu'ile, where I found an equestrian statue of Louis XIV and friendly Anna of the Tourist Bureau. In perfect English she ran me over all sorts of things to do, and I bought from her two days in the tourist bus, a day pass for all the museums (which I will use tomorrow), and precise instructions on how to get to the airport on Saturday morning. Lyon is the birthplace of the famous aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and the airport is named after him. Sadly, in very French fashion the name has been curtailed and everyone refers to the airport as Saint-X.
I was planning to make first a tour of the whole city, but because of the heat I decided to stop at the Roman forum (a bust since it was closed due to "la meteo"), and from there walk to the top of the bluff to visit the Basilica de Notre Dame Fourviére, which in my opinion is the most beautiful church of Lyon. It is as large as the cathedral, but is beautifully decorated with colorful glass windows and magnificent religious scenes made with small squares of Venetian glass, not unlike the ones one sees in Orthodox churches. Besides, the view of Lyon from its balcony is truly magnificent (in turn, looking up from Vieux Lyon or Presqu'ile, it looks like an imposing white fortress).
Speaking of churches, in Vieux Lyon there are three churches, narrow as it is: the cathedral St. Jean (i.e., St. John), St. George, and St. Paul, so the irreverent Lyonnaises believe a new one should be built to complete the set ... St. Ringo.
A curiosity worth mentioning is the Mur Peint, a fabulous mural painted on the windowless side of a building, which show prominent sons and daughters of Lyon, leaning out of their balconies to chat with each other. The only ones I recognized were Antoine de Saint-Euxpéry, dressed like an aviator and talking to Le Petit Prince, and the Lumiere Brothers, inventors of the movie camera.
Another claim to fame of Lyon is being home to the tradition of Guiñol theater, which is used the world over to entertain and moralize children, but which also was loaded with political and social commentary.
The grand event of the afternoon was meeting my former foreign exchange student Marié Joguet. She appeared out of nowhere in my Hydrogeology class and year and a half ago, and bravely stuck to it to the end. She is finishing her studies as an agronomist, and is currently in Lyon completing the internship that is such an important part of higher education here in France. She actually comes from the foothills of the Alps, in Savoy, and her dream is to get a position back in her hometown, where she can be close to agriculture and nature. She is a delightful young woman and I was very glad we managed to converge and have dinner together.
On the way back home I knew I
had to get out at the Garibaldi metro station, but when I got out and reached
for my phone to have Google Maps take me to my residence I found out that my
phone was completely out of battery, dead, dead, dead. I was a victim of our
total reliance on the electronic memory, not remembering the name of the street
I had to get to, nor even the general direction to see if I could recognize a
landmark. With deep shame I had to stop at a gym and ask for help. The nice
woman there had to look for an old style charging cable, and I had to wait
there for ten minutes for the phone to charge enough to release the information
I needed. Turns out I was only a couple of blocks away but I had been walking
in the wrong direction! I hope this teaches me to be more careful about the
battery level of my phone :(
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