Lyon (not Lion)

For a change, I left the details of my weekend travel to someone else. On Wednesday, I still wasn’t sure where I was going to go for the weekend, when my editor Corinne suggested that we go to Lyon in France. She had to pick up a dress she ordered and I was more than happy to catch a ride there with her. We went with three other women from CERN, Renilde, Elena and Cecile, so the car was packed during the hour and a half drive there. I’d never heard of Lyon before living here, probably because Paris soaks up most of France’s spotlight. It’s a really nice city, separated by two rivers, the Rhone and the Saone, and two hills. It was settled by the Romans, and therefore has a lot of Italian influence in its architecture and was once famous for its production of silk.
One of the most striking parts of the city is a cathedral that sits on top of one of the hills. It looks like some kind of fairy tale castle.
The weather was bad at first, gloomy and rainy. We walked down many of Lyon’s shopping district streets and then had lunch at a French restaurant. I had this couscous and vegetable-type creation, which I’ve also had at the CERN cafeteria, so it must be a common dish in the region. As we were eating, the rain poured. And then the skies suddenly cleared and stayed that way for the rest of the day.
We took a guided walking tour in the afternoon. It was led by a very informative, but irritable woman who made threatening gestures to a youth group band that was warming up for a show in one of the city’s churches when their music drowned out her voice. Quite funny.
Most of the tour was based on the oldest houses of Lyon, which have now been turned into apartments or condos. The exteriors and interiors have been restored, keeping the original look to the buildings. Most houses were at least three stories high with arches and spiral stairways. To access them, we had to walk through these covered alleys called traboules, which were created to save time and protect the silk from bad weather when transported.