Many Excursions!

Wow, I can’t believe that I have been here for over a week! I have had a bunch more great adventures these last few days. Also, as I am finishing writing this, I realize it is pretty long. I am going to try writing more often to avoid this if possible…

Models of artifacts in parking lot

Famous stairway in a larger traboule

Friday: We had a great morning off from orientation and I just slept in – which was nice since we’ve had stuff early each morning this week. Then we had another excursion with Annik. We went to explore la Croix-Rousse. Which is the other hill in Lyon. There is a saying that where we went on Thursday (Fourviere) is the hill the prays and La Croix-Rousse is the hill that works. While this was always a part of Lyon beginning in the Roman era (the Roman amphitheater was discovered on this hill), in the 18^th century, there was a mass expansion of buildings in this area that served as housing for the growing working class. The largest industry for these workers was silk production. When these buildings were being constructed, they were all constructed privately without any support from the government. As a result there were no roads built going North/South, just East/West (except for 1 or 2 large roads that remain from the Roman era). So, in order to pass between roads there are little passages called “traboules”. These are the little passages and courtyards in between buildings that would be part of the private residences anywhere else, but here, must remain open to the public. Walking between these passages is called “trabouler”. This is unique to a few small villages and the Croix-Rousse is famous for these. They even served as important hideouts during WWII since Lyon served as an important place for the Resistance movement. Now, la Croix-Rousse has become a cool place to live and there are a lot of what they call “Bobos” living there. Bobo stands for bourgeois/Boehme. So not the traditional catholic bourgeoisie, but more of a hipster bourgeoisie. However, to preserve the character of the neighborhood, the state purchased bunch of houses and now a least ¼ of the residences are social housing projects which preserves a mixed quality to the neighborhood. Because of the constitution of people and the history of this neighborhood, the people there are often very outspoken about their ideas. There is a lot of highly political graffiti that is meticulously cleaned up by the city on a very regular basis. Now, they have begun to hire artists to paint murals to help diminish the graffiti problem. Overall, la Croix-Rousse is really awesome and I can’t wait to go check out the awesome market there and à chacun sa tasse (adorable little salon de thé). Another cool thing that we explored on Friday was the parking lots of Lyon. About 15-20 years ago there was very little open space in the city. There was an enormous project that redid many parking lots and created an amazing walking city with squares all over the place. However, by creating all these squares and getting rid of all the parking lots, there was now no where for people to park. Therefore, a huge project was created and many architects were chosen to create parking lots under each of the squares. However, these are not normal parking lots, they are almost more like museums! Each one has its own individual design. They were designed to provide nice lighting to ensure safety. We saw the one in the Place de Terreaux and it was done by and well-known American architect who was really interested in the incredible history of Lyon. In the entry way is a an old map of Lyon. As you head downwards, on each level there are remakes of artifacts that were found under the square while doing excavations. This area served as the old dump in the middle ages as it was the edge of the old city. They found increadible amounts of information here to explain about the life of people at this time. Each parking lot has a pamphlet about the architect and what his artistic choices were. There is also a complete pamphlet with information about each parking lot. Really an incredible thing!!

Large Road that dates from the
 Roman era (runs North/South)

Roman Ampitheater a la
Croix-Rousse with Fourviere
in the background

The light here indicates
that this is a traboule

Saturday: Saturday we had a tour of la Vieux-Lyon (the old part of Lyon under the Fourviere). The first thing we saw there was an old building right off to the side of the Cathedral. It is one of the oldest buildings in Lyon dating from the 7^th-8^th century. It is really cool because you can see all the places that windows were created and then closed throughout the many years that this building has existed. Also, by looking at the entryway, you can see that the street level of Lyon has been raised throughout the years. Another cool thing was the little streets. They still have the little stone blocks on the side of the roads that served to protect the buildings so that carriages or carts wouldn’t run into the sides of the buildings and destroy them. We also learned about how the streets were named. Because many people weren’t literate, they would identify a street by a landmark. So now  you see a cow at the end of a street and it is Rue de Boeuf. There are also traboules in Vieux-Lyon and in many of them that we passed through we saw stair towers that were much higher than the buildings that they served. These are very similar to what is seen in Tuscany and served as status symbols, so the higher the tower of your building, the better. Another thing that is very Lyonnais are what are called Bouchons (which can also be a cork of a bottle). In this case, they are small family restaurants where the mother cooks the plate of the day and that is what is served. They are often a good price and very nourishing food. I can’t wait to try a real one, however, all the ones in la Vieux-Lyon are really tourist traps and rather expensive. Also, in la Vieux-Lyon remains a presence of marionettes. Since Lyon’s primary industry was silk, during the Revolution they had a lot of troubles since the bourgeoisie was no longer buying their silk. Therefore, one man had the idea to create these hand puppets and created a very successful hand-puppet show based around the well-known main character: Gignol. After this amazing tour, we had a fantastic lunch in la Croix-Rousse with all 5 of us on the program and our director, Barbara, at the Maison Villemanzy. It was really a French style lunch – it lasted many hours we many courses and plenty of wine. It was delicious!! However, it was certainly not what my mom considers to be the French way of eating. When I was younger, whenever Andrew would eat too fast or too much, my mom would say that he should eat like the French, however, this was clearly a myth. The French eat extremely fast (and actually a lot more than I expected). The reason people always think that the French eat slowly is because they eat over long periods of time. Their big meals last a long time, however, they eat each course relatively quickly and then they like to have plenty of time to talk. Saturday Afternoon, we went back to la Vieux-Lyon to go to a miniatures museum which was really fun! That evening we all went out to dinner together and we tried unsuccessfully to find a bar…. I guess we’ll explore the nightlife next weekend.

The tall stair towers

Miniatures Museum

The very old buildings
- look at all the different
windows from different centuries

The stone blocks to protect the buildings

Rue de Boeuf

Gignol

Sunday: Sunday in France is the day to relax and go to Church, not much else is open. So my family went to Church in the morning and I slept in. Then we had a nice long, Sunday lunch. One of my other host family brothers came home for the weekend and brought a friend so we all had lunch together. The food was great and there was plenty of wine. During the week, often the father of the house has wine, but rarely anyone else. At this meal, everyone had a different wine with each course…. After lunch, I met up with the other people on my program and we went to explore the other campus of Lyon 2. It is rather far away and we wanted to see where to go ahead of time so that we wouldn’t end up terribly lost. We did get a little lost, but we figured it out eventually. Unfortunately, since it was a Sunday, literally everything was closed so we couldn’t see much, but at least we figured out how to get there. I hope I won’t have to go to this campus too much since it is much farther and not pretty like the other one, but I think most of my classes will probably end up being there. Oh well. C’est la vie.

Monday: My first day of classes!!! It is really complicated with my classes here and it has been quite frustrating trying to figure out my schedule. Today, I just had one class to try out, but it really early:  8:00am-11:45am. Knowing that I was not going to find the room my first try, I wanted to get there really early and had to wake up at 6:00am. I really need to make sure to go to sleep earlier tonight since I have a class again tomorrow at 8am! It was a French language and grammar course and it seems like it will be good. There are other foreign students in the class from all over the world and I think it will also be a good place to meet people and to make friends. I sat next to a girl from England today and we had lunch together afterwards which was really nice. I know I’ll figure it out, but I’m still a little bit nervous about meeting and making French friends. Tonight I’m headed to a dinner arranged for exchange students to meet other people. Hopefully it will be a good experience!  

The First Week of Adventures

So, clearly blogging is not my calling. I have been planning on writing something every night since I have been here, but I’m a little bit behind. I’ll give just a brief overview and some highlights of the past few days.

Sunday: Wow! I certainly very tired from the long trip. I slept for an impressive 15 hours and finally woke up at 11:30am. I guess I really needed it after having missed a night of sleeping. After waking up, I had my first experience with the shower in my apartment. It was certainly an entertaining one. When looking at the shower on Saturday, I hadn’t thought anything strange. I saw one of the hand-held shower heads sitting on the side of the bath and a place to hang it on the wall above the bath tub. However, little did I realize that there was no shower curtain. Let’s just say, I never realized how important it is to have a shower curtain in order to avoid covering the entire bathroom with water. Haha. After conquering the shower, I had my first meeting with the other 4 students from Penn and our program director. We took a quick tour of the area around the University and had a nice cup of hot chocolate and a little afternoon snack before we all returned home. I took the metro back by myself and surprisingly didn’t end up lost….

Monday: Unfortunately the excessive amount of sleep the previous night lead to some difficulties in sleeping for me. It wasn’t until 8am that I finally fell asleep. Luckily our first day of our orientation didn’t start until 2pm that afternoon. We had a really funny course on intercultural communication where we talked about many accidental mishaps in communication. Then we went to get our French cell phones. Let just say that what should have taken an hour ended up taking much longer! None of us understood how to buy credits and how to pay for a cellphone without purchasing a plan….

The Rhone River

Tuesday: We had a great introductory French class. After lunch we had a cooking course!! We went to this tiny little cooking studio. We had the most delicious lunch. We made a puff pastry with onions, pine nuts and rosemary, a chicken dish with a balsamic vinegar and sundried tomatoes reduction, and finally la piece de resistance: the chocolate cake. It was literally the best tasting chocolate cake I have ever eaten!!! After that we spent the rest of the afternoon walking and exploring the city, doing a little bit of shopping for all the things that everyone forgot to bring with them to France.

Wednesday: We had a cinema class where, unfortunately, I fell asleep during part of it while the instructor was sitting directly in front of me. I was tired, it was boring and then he turned the lights off, what can I say… After that we had another French class where we ended up talking for the most part about all the little differences we have noticed between French and Americans. I returned home for dinner tonight as usual. Ever since I got here, whenever my host mom says the name of her son, I kept thinking she was saying “petit beau” (little beautiful). I knew this couldn’t possibly be correct so everytime she said his name I would listen intently trying to figure out what she was saying. I finally realized that in an old email from the family I had a list of the names of their kids and I discovered that his name was actually Thibaut, pronounced almost the same, just without a tiny bit of a “p” sound at the beginning.

View of Fourviere from the bottom

View of Lyon from Fourviere

Old wood balconies on the oldest street in Lyon

Roman Theater

Swiss clock from 13th century in the Cathedral in Lyon

Thursday: We had a great excursion with Annick up the Fourviere by the funicular to the Basilica. Despite the freezing cold and the fog, it was still a beautiful view of all of Lyon and the outside of the basilica was very pretty (under construction until March, so I will have to return then to see the beautiful décor inside and the view from the mountain without all the fog). After having a nice hot chocolate, we began our descent down the mountain by foot. We passed by the remnants of 2 Roman theaters that were very really cool. A lot of it had been reconstructed in the 1930’s when it was discovered, but there were still some of the large stone pieces from the Roman era. As we continued our descent we saw the oldest street in city and a little corner where there were still wood balconies that remained from many, many centuries ago (the only ones left in the city). We made it to the bottom to the Cathedral that serves as the most important/powerful church in the city. It was built between the 12^th-15^th centuries and was very nice inside. There was a beautiful clock inside made by the Swiss in the 13^th century that had so many incredible moving parts. After our excursion we had our first real, relaxing French lunch. We found a little hole in the wall place where I had a great salad and a delicious crepe (my first one since being here!) and some great white wine. After that, we returned to the University to take a French language test to find out our level (somehow I placed into the highest level taught at the University – C1) and to work on choosing our courses. After a few hours of frustration with the course search I returned home to continue working on it. I’m sure I’ll figure it out, but right now it is very complicated because there is no centralized list with all the courses taught at the University like there is at Penn. It is really a mouse hunt to find the time schedule for each department with the courses being offered (because French students just take one subject, they don’t get to choose like we do in the states….)

First Day

(View from my room - Lyon)

After a long flight, I finally arrived in France. I have been planning to study abroad in France for as long as I can remember. It was an unfulfilled dream of my mom’s and something that I have always wanted to do. It is crazy to think that the time has finally come and that I am actually here. I left Seattle at 1:45pm on the 13^th. I took a 10 hour flight to Paris CDG (which unfortunately included very little sleeping and many movies). Once arriving in Paris at 8:30am, I had an hour to get to my connecting flight to Lyon. After 3 airport buses, passport control, re-passing through security and running through the terminal, I made it to the gate 5 minutes before my flight was set to take off and happy collapsed into my seat on the plane. Arriving in the Lyon Saint-Exupery airport, I had the fun task of collecting all my luggage on my own before heading to find my family. Walking out of the gate, I didn’t recognize anyone and saw no sign with my name. A little panic began to set in before I saw Marc running into the airport with my name on a sign. The sudden switch to speaking in French was a little bit jarring, but I carried along quite well throughout the entire car ride and subsequent lunch at the apartment. After taking a brief nap and unpacking all my belongings into m great room, the exhaustion finally set in. It was a long few hours before dinner as I sat staring idly at my computer screen, merely attempting to stay awake until after dinner. Overall, it was a great first day. My host family is so sweet and they really seem like they are going to help make for a great experience. I can’t wait to start exploring Lyon tomorrow!