Discovering Lyon

So here I am again! Today we left Archamps and headed for Lyon in France. The car was acting a little funny the way it changed gears on the drive there but we got there fine. Overall I must say though that I am VERY pleased with the Peugeot 307SW. Anyways yeah so we go to Lyon and then starting looking around. We were starving so we went to some little burger store and I finally (as I had said I would!) had French Fries in France – there were nothing special about them though hahaha. After that we unpacked our stuff and were in for a surprise to realize that there wasn’t a direct elevator from street level so as luck had it we had to lift our equipment over a few sets of stairs to get it to the elevator. This might not sound like a big deal but the box is heavy! After that we went to Lyon’s city center. The center of Lyon is actually very nice and a great place to do shopping, with a similar shopping atmosphere to Rome’s Spanish Steps area. I bought some nice shirts and a pair of causal shoes. I also noticed that the McDonald’s there had a Ronald McDonald and couldn’t help but take a picture with him! After that Peter and I split up to go explore the city. I headed towards Fourviere, which has a nice castle on it, a stunted version of the Eiffel tower (Tour Metallique), and offers a REAL nice view of the city. One the way to that I went through some of Lyon’s famous traboules, which are kinda like age old secret passageways that link certain streets together through the buildings. They were quite nice. Back to Fourviere…I had no idea how high up it actually was. And after climbing like a 1000 steps I made it to the castle. I was too tired to go to the tower and then after seeing the nice city view headed back down. Man was that ever tiring! After that Peter and I met up again and decided to entertain ourselves by finding a laundry-mat to wash our clothes. I took a little detour to try and find a place to get a haircut but was out of luck cause the stores were all closed by then. So after doing a little bit more detouring (by shopping) I headed back and had the pleasure of doing my laundry. The place we washed our clothes though was pretty ghetto they had like 6 working washing machines and only 1 working dryer…so as we speak my clothes are still hanging in the hotel closet to dry :(
We then had dinner, did some work, and then I decided to go check out the night life in Lyon. I followed the tips from my tour book and headed to this club that is on a boat called the Le Fish. When I headed in that direction I didn’t see Le Fish so was a little angry but I saw some other boat club called Le Siuson or something like that I don’t remember. Anyways I waited in line and then was surprised to see that they weren’t checking ids (more about this in a sec) and was like hmmm interesting the French here don’t care. It was kinda embarrassing when they asked me who else I was with and I said no one, but anyways I went in to see what it was like. I walked around a bit sipping my drink and then realized that it was getting pretty boring here, not being able to speak French very well, so not really being able to meet people and at the same time being there by myself to begin with. All of a sudden I realized one other thing – everyone here was much younger than me! You might laugh but it did take a little while to realize it. I’m (only) 22 and I realized that these people here were like 16, 17 or something like that. One more reason to leave! Anyways I left and then walked on and then saw Le Fish….but they wouldn’t let me in cause they said I couldn’t go in alone. BOOOOO. I headed to another area where there were supposedly a place lots of English speaking tourists went and every place that looked half decent was full. Then of course, it started to rain! I ran for cover to save my precious thinning hair (yes I admit it!) and after running around for a while I realized I didn’t know where I was. After a few seconds of searching my trusty tourist map I figured out I hadn’t gone that far and then headed in the direction of the hotel. I took a few detours to see if there was anywhere else to do something but they were all dead ends. So thus ended my Saturday night. I came back and took a nice long hot shower...I wasn’t that wet but my feet were getting sore from all the days walking. It’s around 4 am here right now and I have a long drive to Nice tomorrow hahaha so I should probably end things here. It’s getting very long already! Though I may have made the day sound like it was really crappy it was actually pretty good and in some ways very interesting. I’ve also realized how much I miss my friends/family from back home (and also waterloo which I guess is my second home – but not for much longer though!) and how much fun we would have when we hung out.
I’m gonna post some pics shortly.