Lions and Snails

Salut mes amis!
Yesterday, the Junior Year in France program had a day trip to Lyon!  Although the title of the post is "Lions and Snails" Lyon is pronounced LEE-on.  So after an early morning metro ride (complete with people who clearly had not yet gone to bed after their revelries the night before) we hopped on our 7h23 train to Lyon.  Voila un carte for a reference of Paris to Lyon:

We took the TGV (train de grand vitesse/super fast train) and arrived at 9h37.  Lyon is gorgeous!  As strange and stupid as it sounds, I kind of forgot that there is a whole lot more to France than Paris.  To me, Paris is Parisian first and French second, and Lyon is French first and Lyonnais second.  However when I made this observation at the dinner table tonight, my host dad immediately objected with at "Pas du tout!!" (Not at all!) He said they are Lyonnais first, and French second.  I guess I'll need to spend more time in Lyon to figure the national and city identity out.

Voila un carte de Lyon:

We started our tour at the top of Vieux Lyon at the Basilique de Fourviere.  Construction started in 1872, and was finished in the early 20th century.  Our tour guide said it is in the Byzantine Style.  Sadly we did not get to go into the main part of the church because it is under renovation, but we were able to go into the chapel beneath. 

View of Lyon from the lookout at the Basilica, we were very lucky with the weather!

 La Basilique de Fourivre

In the crypte (pretty sure now that crypte can also mean basement, not just a place for dead bodies...)



After the church we started to head down the hill toward the Roman Theaters.  Back in the day (Roman Empire days) Lyon was an important trading city in Gaul.  The Romans built these massive amphitheaters for music, plays, and speeches.  The theater used to seat 10,000 people!  Nowadays the space is used for performances in the summertime and seats 3,000 people.  Our tour guide told us that the stone stages are original and used stone from different parts of the Roman Empire. 

 Good job Romans!

Roman Aqueduct

After marveling at the work of the ancient Romans, we walked down the rest of the hill to Vieux Lyon.  I cannot imagine trying to drive a stick shift up that hill, but several Pugeots drove past us on the cobbled streets.  Vieux Lyon looked like what you picture a small French village to look like.  Very quaint and charmant, because if the style isn't broken, why fix it??

Cathedral St. Jean

At the heart of the old city is the Cathedral St. Jean.  You could probably spend a year visiting old cathedrals, chapels, and churches and not see them all.  This church took 200 years to build, and is home to a fantastic 700 year old astrological clock.

The clock displays not only the time, but lunar patterns as well, and has moving parts like a cuckoo clock! 

This is Rue de Bouef (Beef Street).  There is even a little cow statue above the street sign!

After our tour, we were free for lunch, so I met up with some family friends from Stroudsburg who have relocated to Lyon.  They kindly showed me some more of the old city and told me about their life in Lyon over lunch.  It's been two weeks and I still have not had a bad meal here in France!  My family friends suggested something called a "tarte flette" which was a salad along with a potato, bacon, and cheese dish.  It was simply delicious!  They said one of the things the love about French food is the seasonality of the dishes and produce offered.  You can't get a tarte flette in the summer; it's a winter dish and really warms you up from the inside.  For dessert I had a creme brulee.  YUM. It was really nice to see some familiar Stroudsburg faces in France!  Apres that, it was time for a puppet show....

  

Guignol was the hero and is very Lyonnais apparently, the show was very well done.  However I only understood about 10 minutes of it.  The actors were speaking in funny voices (high pitched or low pitched depending on the character) and very VERY fast.  I might have been able to follow along if there was only one added difficulty, but I was hopeless, as were many of my friends on the program.  Oh well! With the little time we had left in our visit, we headed to the Presqu'ile(the landmass between the Saone and the Rhone rivers) to wander about the city.  Eventually we came to Place Bellecour, the third largest square in Paris, complete with a statue of Louis XIV.

 Place Bellecour.  The Basilica where we started our day is the white building at the top of the hill!

 Louis XIV and Lyon's version of the Eiffel Tower

All in all it was a wonderful trip!  I enjoyed my day in Lyon and I am looking forward to exploring more of France.  There is so much history and so much to see and so much to learn!  Sacre Bleu!

Today I played tour guide again to Jeanette and her Penn State friends.  They said the waiters were much less pleasant when I was not with them to speak French!  Dommage....anyway, we saw some sights and then headed towards Montmartre.  I had already been to see Sacre-CoeurMontmartre.  So Parisian, so artsy, so fun.  It was a nice day out today, so there were lots of tourists about as well.  Please note that I do not consider myself a tourist here in Paris, bien sur.  I am an etudiant (a student), I am living here for an extend period of time and I speak French.  Anyway, some pictures....

 I will certainly come back on another nice day to get a better look at what the artists have to offer.  I saw a lot of Paris landscapes, as well as some other more modern works in various mediums.  My friends had a train to catch back to London, but they wanted to have one last meal in France before heading back to the land of fish and chips....

Les Escargots

Oui mes amis, we ordered escargot.  I knew that snails are a typical French dish, but I had not yet gathered the will to order some.  Jeanette, Kelly and I decided to go for it and ordered six garlicky snails. 

 Forking my victim with my escargot fork.  We later realized we should have used tongs to pick up the snails and not our fingers.  I guess it's a rookie escargot mistake. 

 There is no turning back....

Verdict: Delicious! 

I was so proud of the French-ness of my lunch (I also had French Onion Soup to wash down the escargot)!  I told my host family about my lunch and they laughed and seemed to be proud of me too.  We agreed that anything cooked in that much garlic and butter cannot be that bad.  Although I still prefer a crepe to escargot, I confess I would order the dish again.  Have any of you eaten escargot?  Tell me where and when in a comment!  Feel free to also tell me if you are disgusted and cannot imagine eating the slimy things. 

Bisous,

Allison