Holiday Adventures: Part I

Okay, okay, I know I said I'd write sooner-- in fact I did write very soon after my travels, however Blogger decided to lose my draft (twice!) and I was in a mood with it, so...

In fact, before I get onto my travels, I've had a bit of a technological nightmare recently. Not only did I lose my blogs, but my phone had a curious episode where all of a sudden it changed the home screen unlock completely. By itself. I always had a pattern, but I woke up the Tuesday after getting back from my travels and found that suddenly I had a keypad with a code I naturally didn't know, and so my phone completely inaccessible. (And before you think of all the obvious codes: 0000, 1111, 1234, and backwards and suchlike, I tried everything to no avail.)

Of course, phones aren't everything, but they are darn useful. On Tuesdays, I start work at 8 and at 7.30 I meet a colleague who picks me up at a metro station in another town and drives us both to work. I got to my local station on time and got on a metro straight away. All good so far. Then I noticed the doors were staying open longer than usual... Trust this to be the day where the whole line breaks down for a fairly significant amount of time in terms of the daily commute. I knew I'd be really late, but of course, how could I warn my colleague? I had to run home (since I don't live far from the metro), send her a Facebook message and pray she saw it. She didn't. Cutting a fairly long story short, I was about 30-40 minutes late to work and had no way of telling anyone I would be, and felt awful about my colleague having to wait for me for no reason and the teacher and class I should have been with having no idea where I was. After days of trying to resolve the phone issue, it seemed the only way to fix it was to get a factory reset and lose everything-- photos of my time in France, holidays and the rest! (Thank goodness for Facebook sync.)

I digress...

As I mentioned in my last post, I have now traveled a little more during the school holidays. The first place I actually went was home, just for a few days so I could bring some things back and see friends and family. It felt quite strange going back-- especially as it was only about 7 weeks ago that I'd gone back to France after the Christmas holidays.

My first real holiday destination was Lyon. Until then, I'd never been to the south of France and I'd been very keen to visit, especially since it's known for being quite warm! I met my friend Mark at the train station in Lyon and we walked through the town in search of the youth hostel we'd booked. The walk was great because we got to see quite a bit of the town since the youth hostel was half way up the hill in the old part of town-- the opposite side of town to the train station.

There are two rivers in Lyon (the Rhône and the Saône) and they aren't far from each other. We noticed that the colour of the water was really unusual. Sometimes the water was extremely blue, sometimes an opaque jade green-- but never that horrible mucky colour we're so used to at home.

Before you ask, I don't know which is which, or even if they're the same river or not...

One of the best things about Lyon is the regional praline tart

Although it looks fruity, it's just pralines and sugar. I think they dye it pink with some sort of rose extract: it's amazing. It's probably a good job I don't live there. I will also take the opportunity to add that if museums and churches don't do it for you, it's well worth eating your way around France-- not that that's a main appeal for me or anything. (Ahem.)

In honesty, I didn't expect to enjoy Lyon as much as I did. but in fact there's loads to do there. Our hostel wasn't far from the basilica and the first century ampitheatres, so on our second day we explored the top of the hill. 

Firstly, there was a great view of Lyon from the hostel:

The ampitheatres were really cool to see. When you know something is as old as that, it's mind-blowing to think how many people must have been where you're standing and what they were doing. 

Mark went down well with the crowd:

Was it something I said?

The Basilica was an amazing site and somewhere I'd definitely recommend going if you're ever in Lyon.

The photos really can't quite convey how amazing it is inside. Unfortunately, there was some maintenance being done on the exterior, so I couldn't get particularly good pictures of that, but it's the inside that's worth seeing!

The weather was absolutely wonderful all the time we were there, so we decided to go to Le Parc de la Tête d'Or. I didn't have high expectations of it, I just thought it would be a nice place to have a quick walk around. How wrong I was! When the weather is nice, you really can spend a whole afternoon-- maybe even a whole day there. It's huge. There's a zoo and a huge tropical greenhouse (although we didn't go in there). The grounds are beautifully kept and there's a lake with an underground passage to get to the island in the middle which we thought was a cool idea. 

View from the island.

Did you know that a leopard is 'panthère de l'amour' in French? (Love panther)? Hmmm....

I think the highlight was the poor deer who was a bit too enthusiastic about licking all the flavour out of a bag of crisps and got the bag stuck over his upper jaw and his nose for quite a while (don't worry, he could still breathe and he eventually shook it off, but it's a reminder not to litter, nonetheless).

Bless...

It's safe to say we did a lot of walking, which of course merited some good food in the evening-- in particular, this crêpe:

I feel hungry just remembering it!

Anyway, that's a taster of Lyon for you. It really is a great place to just walk around and explore and the old part of town is really charming. 

Provided that I don't have another Blogger melt-down, I'll post about my trip to Amsterdam soon!

À bientôt!