Lyon Day 2

Friday, July 10, 2009
Lyon, Rhône-Alpes, France
Lyon is so worth spending 2 days! It's such a pleasant and beautiful place! We visited all 3 cathedrals of the Old Town of Lyon: St. John, St. George and St. Paul (they really need to build St. Ringo to complete the set =]). St. John is obviously the biggest (no offense to Paul, whom I love very much) and it houses an amazing astrological clock, supposedly the oldest working mechanism in the world (over 500 years old and still ticking!). The clock tells hour of the day, minute (on a separate egg-shaped dial for some obscure reason), current zodiac sign, phase of the Moon, year, month, day of the month, day of the week (in Georgian and Roman formats) and the list of Catholic holidays for the year. 4 times a day (at noon, 1pm, 2pm, 3pm and 4pm) the clock plays a little show, which starts with triple crooning of a rooster, followed by an angel popping out of the door behind virgin Mary and a pigeon dropping from a trap door above her, followed by god blessing Mary with a jerk of the hand and a red-coated Swiss guard walking around the bell tower.
After visiting the main cathedral, we walked around the old town through a maze of narrow medieval streets and "traboules" - narrow passageways under long buildings that allow quick access to the next street.
Having traversed the old part of Lyon back and forth, up and down, we headed to a more modern area to see the regular life of the inhabitants of the city. A short streetcar ride took us to Etats-Unis (United States) neighborhood, built by a famous local architect Tony Garnier for industry workers. While the general area is pretty nice and quiet, the houses are mostly gray concrete rectangles, featureless and rather dreary.
Returning back to hotel after a long day, we had a dinner of crackers and Alpine cheese (that we bought in highland village of Gimmelwald).

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juliettka
2009-07-10

From Jules :)
I was wearing contacts today, so the city was really crisp, detailed, ornate and colourful in my eyes :)
We had breakfast at the hotel (which was supposed to cost $8, but no one asked us to pay - maybe, when we check out?)
On the way to the tourist office to book our walking tour, I checked out some stores. There are big sales going on right now in France - they have sales for a few weeks twice a year - I guess, to get rid of the old collections, as, I guess, the French can't bear to have the same fashions for two seasons in a row :)) So, things get discounted several times during these sale periods.
I got a pair of very nice Spanish shoes/sandals for 50% the price ;)
The sales guy was excessively charming, called me 'madame' about fifty times, and talked me into getting some cream for leather as well.
Then we took the walking tour for 2 hours, and saw what Dima described 8-)
Sitting on a bench near Saone river taking a break, I decided to get out my new shoes to try them on. Dima & I were just discussing how nice a little leather strip on the shoe is when I pulled out the second shoe and noticed there was no such strip on it... Voila, the charming but disorganized, like they French are, salesguy had packed for me two similar looking, but DIFFERENT shoes!
The stores generally close at 7 pm here, and it was 6:30. Luckily, we were not too far from the store, so we ran like hell and made it there, managing to exchange the wrong shoe for the right one :))
Talk about intuition with me deciding to look at the shoes at that exact time and place...

2025-02-08

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