Since I have written, we have visited friends
in Paris for a few days through Christmas Eve Dinner, had a wonderful Christmas
dinner and overnight with friends in Villefranche-sur-Soane, had a visit here from
our Paris friends, had Lyon friends here for lunch, taken a sightseeing trip to
the Macon region of Burgundy, as well as our normal activities living in
Lyon. We are more than half-way through
our year here now and we still love it.
We are beginning to despair about having to leave, even though we miss
friends and family at home in the US.
I propose to use this post to just show you some pictures of
our life and activities since before Christmas.
Next time I’ll show you pictures of our recent overnight trip to
Montpellier.
Even though there was a transportation strike that cancelled
lots of trains throughout France, we were able to take the TGV to Paris on Dec.
23 to visit Lorraine’s friend from high school Barbara Major and Paul Kaehler. The strike had also stopped the metros and
most buses in Paris, so we didn’t do a lot of travelling around the city. Fortunately, we had a wonderful hotel in an
excellent neighborhood near our friends’ apartment. We had a great view of the Eiffel Tower
outside our window.
Walking down hill toward the Tower, we also passed a
memorial to Comte de Grasse, who helped Washington defeat the British at
Yorktown.
We ate a fabulous Christmas Eve Dinner with Barbara, Paul,
and their friends at Le Reminet in Paris.
My entrée, plat (paleron de veau) and dessert are shown. The food, wine and conversation were all
excellent.
On Christmas day we rode the TGV back to Lyon from Paris,
then immediately jumped on a slower train to go back up the river to
Villefranch-sur-Soane for Christmas dinner with new friends Mike and Joan Smith and Mark and Anne Gallops. We
started with Anne’s foie gras with spiced bread and ended with a traditional
bouche de noel. While I don’t have
photographs, the company and everything in between was also wonderful.
Mike and Joan’s house – right on the Soane river that also
goes through Lyon – is fantastic, as you can see.
Shortly after Christmas, we had an errand to run in the
Croix-Paquet area – one metro stop or a very steep walk downhill from our
apartment - and we happened upon the restaurant La Mere Brazier, which Lorraine
recognized as one of the very best in Lyon.
Mere Brazier was one of the five women who took over running top
restaurants during the war, and she was the mentor for many top chefs,
including most notably, Paul Bocuse, who died last year but is still revered
here in Lyon. We decided to go in for lunch.
Fortunately, we were told we had to use the Menu d’Affaires
(Lunch Menu) because it was after the closing time between lunch and
dinner. The reason that was fortunate is
that the prices on the a la carte menu ranged from 80 euros/person up to 250
euros (for 2 to 4 people). Our lunch
menu was 2 courses for 62 euros or 3 courses for 75 euros. The meal was worth every centime and
more. In addition to the two plats
(courses) we ordered – main and dessert – they served at least 3 more. Everything was absolutely delicious, and the
service was impeccable. I only have
pictures of our two desserts, but they might give you an idea of what it was like.
One of our favorite spots in Lyon is the exit from the metro
at Cordeliers station. As the escalator
gets to the top, you look left and see the beautiful Bourse (or stock
exchange), and you look right and see the reflection of that building in the
glass façade of the Monoprix. We never
get tired of it.
Here is a picture of our highly-energy-efficient French
clothes dryer. Using it makes me feel
pretty self righteous.
We took a trip to the Lyon Museum of Modern Art. Here are a couple of the outdoor exhibits and
a picture of the Park de Tete d’Or, across the street from the gallery.
On New Year’s Eve, we ran into our two next-door neighbors,
Sylvie and Muriel who said that the party they had planned to attend was
cancelled because the host had the flu. We
invited them to our apartment for some Champagne. They came with oysters and foie gras, so we
had a really good party ourselves. We
went through the champagne pretty quickly, but had sufficient wine reserves to
keep the party going.
When Barbara and Paul (from Paris) came to visit us in Lyon
we went to an immersive Picasso exhibit.
Large rooms were set up with angled walls and planes and lots of
projectors displayed his art on floors, ceilings, and the angled walls. The patrons walked through it all, sometimes making
shadows on the projected art. It was
fascinating.
We walked from the Picasso Exhibit down to the Confluence
Museum at the confluence of the Rhone and Saone rivers, passing the green world headquarters of Euronews. The Confluence Museum
looks like it could be a massive space ship that happened to land where the two
rivers come together.
Backing up a good many centuries, here are some pictures
from the Cathedral St. Jean, where Henri IV married Marie de Medici in
1600. This Cathedral is one of my favorite
places in Lyon.
Lyon is lighted beautifully at night. Here is Barbara photographing the Woodrow
Wilson bridge and the Grand Hotel Dieu across the Rhone.
The murals in Lyon are a special treat. I have shown you the big picture of the Mur
de Canuts in a previous blog post. Here
are Lorraine and Barbara following a young woman into a bank in the mural, and
Paul getting fresh with a much younger woman on the steps.
It looks like one of the mural painters let the plaster
harden a little too much while he was working!
Here is one of the famous Traboules on the way up the hill
to the Croix-Rousse. This is the well-known
Cour des Voraces, unique because of the monolithic concrete structure
supporting the stairs.
On an extremely cold and windy January day (I had to tie my
hat on with my scarf.), we went to a bridge on the Rhone to watch 300 crazy
people swim 8 km down the river. This is
an annual event so we had to see it.
Some of the swimmers had floatation devices, but others just swam with
flippers. It was impressive.
I really like this view of the Croix-Rousse plateau from the
Soane river.
Near the end of January, we took the train to Macon to meet
new friend Chantal, who took us through some Maconnais villages and particularly
to the Rock of Solutre, which stands guard over the vineyards of Pouilly-Fuisse.
Finally, at least twice a week one of us exclaims about the
sky at sunset from our 5th floor windows. I’ll leave you with a couple of pictures of the
view.
