Friday, 21 July 2017 to Thursday, 27 July 2017
We went shopping for a weapon of mozzie mass destruction… Adri was not winning this battle on her own, and I’m too timid to join in the fight. Last week we did buy and try those spiral thingies that sits atop this pathetic little aluminium throne and burns only at its own behest, in the process giving off a foul smell. I suspect it works better outside the home but there’s no specific rule to that.But, at the mozzie corner of Carrefour we had a choice of a thousand weapons. We finally decided on a contraption that you plug into a socket, stick a small bottle of liquid into its arms and then start praying that it actually does something. These little bottles of liquid, which is supposed to last for 45 nights, come either sans smell, or with smell, we chose the one with a citronella fragrance, I at least want to know whether it was doing something, even if it’s just giving off a pleasant smell.

And by the time we had bagged our weapon we unfortunately looked around and saw other things that we liked. The trip ended up in a full blown shopping trip with two unexpectedly heavy bags, unexpectedly accompanying us home.

We were planning on going out for supper tonight but it was getting late and we were getting lazy, or lazier. As we left the shopping centre we found the perfect reason to not go out for supper; there was a lovely soft rain that accompanied us home, it was perfect for staying in and binge watching something. Also, with two bags bursting at the seams, we had plenty to keep ourselves occupied with. Supper was a ready roast chicken, a truck load of chips and a huge green salad with all the trimmings and trappings expected of such.

We started watching Ozark which IMDb describes as “A Chicago-based financial advisor secretly relocates his family to the Missouri Ozarks when his dealings with a drug cartel go awry.” It stars Jason Bateman which you will remember from that wonderful comedy series Arrested Development.  His character is very similar in personality in both, makes one think whether that is his personality. Be as it may, thus far we are really enjoying Ozark which has, as a bonus, some wonderful scenery of the Ozark area in Missouri.

We had a lazy Saturday morning while preparing our minds for the onslaught of what was to come, the individual time trials of the Tour de France in Marseille. I guess we could have planned our renting arrangements better to still have been in Marseille, but, we thoroughly enjoyed our experience watching the race finish in Romans-sur-Isère on Tuesday.

It was a treat to watch the time trial, recognising all the spots along the course where we had walked or driven during our month’s stay there. We were just reminded once again what a wonderful place Marseille is to spend time in.

At times I switched to watch spots of rugby, just to make sure my team, the Lions, were doing well in their quarterfinal match… they weren’t. Not sure what went wrong, they played dismally but thankfully pulled though in the last minute with a penalty kick. The game was not enjoyable to watch in more ways than one though. The camera angles were just awful; it was as if there was only one camera at the grounds, stationed at centre of the field, zooming in from time to time, that’s it. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m right, but is the television station perhaps cutting down on cameras and costs? Maybe it was just a technical glitch, I hoped, we’ll see next week.

We have not had a chance to really explore Lyon yet so on Sunday we put on our walking shoes and… walked. We strolled through a fresh produce market not too far from us, but we weren’t buying, we had places to go. We then ambled up another road and crossed the River Rhone where there was yet another market, this one more classy with a wide variety of freshly made goods to eat right there. We had just had breakfast, so we weren’t buying, we had places to go. We walked amongst some beautiful buildings and squares and then we came upon our second river, the River Saone, which joins the Rhone a few kilometres downstream.

 

We crossed the River Saone via the pedestrian bridge called Passerele du Palais de justice and we were greeted on the other side by the Cour d’Appel de Lyon (Court of Appeal of Lyon), a beautiful building. And visible from just above its roof, in the distance up on the hill, was the La Basilique Notre Dame de Fourvière and the Metallic tower of Fourvière where we were heading. The latter is a kind of a mini version of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, quite cool.

 

Trying to get up the hill we first had to manoeuvre past another lovely cathedral called Lyon Cathedral or Cathédrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste and of course Adri had to manoeuvre inside. Right next to it is the Jardin archéologique St-Jean showing off some lovely ancient excavations.

 

 

 

 

We then climbed the million and one steps up to the basilica, which is rather awesome with amazing views from up there across the whole of Lyon. La Basilique Notre Dame de Fourvière is actually two churches in one, one on top of the other. The top one is very ornate and beautifully decorated with the bottom one – reached via a set up steps inside the basilica – more understated but beautiful in its own right.

 

 

 

 

 

We headed down the hill in another direction, this time down a steep hill, we bypassed the million and one steps, we weren’t ready for another bout of muscle spasms. At the bottom we found Rue Saint Jean with the surrounding area dotted with little boutique shops, souvenir shops, and of course an abundance of restaurants and/or bouchons.

 

 

 

 

Bouchon is described by wiki as “A type of restaurant found in Lyon, France, that serves traditional Lyonnaise cuisine, such as sausages, duck pâté or roast pork. Compared to other forms of French cooking such as nouvelle cuisine, the dishes are quite fatty and heavily oriented around meat…. Typically, the emphasis in a bouchon is not on haute cuisine but, rather, a convivial atmosphere and a personal relationship with the owner.” Sounds like my kinda place!

 

 

 

We got home with feet screaming to be put up on a pedestal – in our case the coffee table – and we continued watching Ozark. We binged through the last three episodes and, taking all into account, we generally enjoyed it, probably worth your while to watch. And by the way, if the word Ozark rings a bell somewhere, as it did for me, it is probably due to your remembering the band called Ozark Mountain Daredevils. And although their music is a bit country/hillbilly-ish they had a wonderful hit in 1975 called Jackie Blue, which you may remember if you are as ancient as that… I remember it well.

The weather over that last few days have been very agreeable, mostly cloudy, with temperatures in the low 20s, with soft showers in patches during the day. Monday would be no different.

Yoga was followed by breakfast followed by blogging. With the move from Marseille to Lyon and the subsequent settling in I have not spent much time on this blogging thing, now the chickens have come home to roost… it was time to play catch-up again.

It was mid evening when I was ready to start the publishing process, but oh dear, things could not have gone more awry than it did. When copying the text from my Word document into the WordPress editor, I noticed a group of errant special character that were seemingly, randomly, inserted into the text. It turns out that each apostrophe was somehow replaced by ’. Each quote sign was also prettified with special characters and the special characters in some of the names in the original text were replaced with other special characters. I can hear Didier saying “It’s a mess!” and it was.

I suspect it must have had something to do with converting one character set to another but why now? The only thing that changed during the past week was a major Windows 10 update, so it probably had something to do with that, but I was not in the mood to dig for details, I just wanted this thing published, it was getting late.

So, I had no time to find the real cause or an eloquent solution and thus I had to retype each wayward character throughout the text. Once complete it was time to insert and arrange all the pictures, and oh dear, not once, not twice, but thrice, when I tried to use the backspace key in a specific position, the whole screen disappeared and I had to start all over again…Grr,  or rather… GRR…

Adri had in the meantime gone to bed but was woken up a number of times with my spiced up mutterings that reached unpremeditated volumes. I once had a t-shirt that had three cats drawn on it depicting the moods of a happy, confused and a seriously pissed off cat. I was that seriously pissed off cat right about now.

After so many glitches and gremlins in the machinery last night we slept in until just before 10:00. Some admin, some yoga and some breakfast were followed by some shopping. We had to get something done.

I needed stuff, Adri needed different stuff, so when we arrived at the Part Dieu Shopping Centre we split up and went our separate ways. I was still in the market for a Samsung S7 Edge or S8, the dual sim version though, which is simply not available in France and neither in many parts of the world. Needless to say, my search was unsuccessful. Yes, I can order one from Amazon or such, but I still prefer buying something sensitive like this from a bricks and mortar shop. I guess I’ll have to change this specific shopping habit of mine.

How ambiguous is the English language? Let me count the ways. Just today I had a run-in with the word biweekly; does it mean twice a week or once every two weeks, I just… did… not… know! Do you?

I consulted the Oxford dictionary which describes it as “occurring twice a week or occurring every two weeks”, it was as confused as me. So, if someone tells you they will come around biweekly, you’ll either be pissed or happy, depending on whether it is a likeable person or not. I dislike such ambiguity, so in future I will only use “twice a week” or “every two weeks. Aah… now isn’t that much clearer. Oxford, please dump that word in your next release, please.

It was later on in the evening that my eye fell on an article on CNN nogal (mind you) titled “South Africa’s ‘Whites-only’ town to launch digital currency”. Tentatively clicking on the link I was presented with a picture that read ”Welom in Orania”, I was not sure how to feel about that. Although the article states that “Spokesmen say there is no racial discrimination in Orania, but the foundational imperative to preserve Afrikaner culture effectively prohibits racial diversity”, this article was not a debate about the racist or non-racist behaviour of Orania. It was rather about the fact that Orania will be launching their own digital currency called e-ora, named after their existing currency the ora, which is pegged to the South African rand. What’s next, nothing surprises me anymore!

France was burning and it continued into Wednesday and the hot dry weather and strong winds in the south certainly did not help the cause. Man, what a pity to see that amazing scenic countryside go up in flames, so to speak. I guess we were lucky to have seen the Côte d’Azur in its magnificent glory a few weeks back before the blaze.

While we still in Europe we have many places to go and people to see and thus we still planned to get to Ashley and Remko in Amsterdam. When we saw that someone was looking for another someone to look after their lovely apartment in Amsterdam while they take a well deserved break, we applied and got the thumbs up. Apparently there were 52 applications, we were the lucky ones! So, we will be in Amsterdam from 25 August until 16 September where we will meet up with Ashley and Remko, we’re really looking forward to that.

We’ll be leaving Lyon on 17 August so we have some time between then and 25 September, maybe to visit Paris and have a few beers with Philippe? After 16 September the intention is to rent a car, drive to Slovenia and visit Marina and Steve, and travel around Slovenia and the countries that surround it. So much to do, so little time.

We scheduled a travelling day for Thursday and so it was that we slowly made our way to the Garibaldi metro where we bought a 24 hour travel pass for €5.60 each. This pass gives you unlimited access to all metros, trams and busses across the city. My ticket would however end up costing €11.20, but I’m getting ahead of myself…

After purchasing two tickets we entered through the access gates by feeding the ticket into the side of the machine. It validates it, spits it out at the top of the machine, the gate opens, you grab your ticket and you are on your way. We took a two station hop from Garribaldi to Guillotière where we had identified a copy shop which needed our money.

As we exited the Guillotière metro station I fed my ticket to the machine and, as it gripped it out of my hand, I noticed there was no slot to return the ticket to me. I quickly realized that, on exit, you only feed the machine when you complete your travel for the day. “OK, I learned the hard way”, I thought as I made my way to the ticket vending machine to make another €5.60 deposit.

We needed to go to the copy shop, and I am embarrassed to say this, to send off a fax. For those of you who don’t know what a fax is, follow this link. Seriously, do people still use faxes? But apparently they do. The copy shop lady which I guessed was around 20 years of age had no inkling of what I was talking about. A lady in her 40s tried to explain what it was but that seemed to confuse her even more, she snickered. After getting our document printed we tried a Tabac shop but we were met with a “non” and plenty of smiles, I felt like and idiot, I felt like Rip van Winkle. How could an apparently modern commercial organisation request a fax from me, it defies logic and common sense.

Anyways, after an extensive search we came up with nothing, but did come up with a brilliant idea. Let’s get the company’s branch in Lyon to do their own dirty work. And they did. “Fax!”, I can hear Renate say, “isn’t that something!”

We got on the metro at Bellecour and headed all the way to Vaulx-en-Velin where we disembarked but found nothing of interest there. We backtracked, got off at Hotel de Ville, transferred to Metro Line C and finally got off at Croix-Rousse.

We walked around and found it to be a lovely calm area, but it was not what we were expecting… Now I have a confession to make. Adri and I were in Lyon in September 2003 and vowed never to return. The reason for such vow was frustration, pure and simple, I’ve never been that frustrated in one day in my entire life, and I’m not kidding here… but let me explain.

After a long day on the road from Paris via Dijon, and still trying to get to grips with the left hand driving on the right side of the road, I was exhausted when we got to Lyon. It was around 17:00 when we stopped at the local Lyon Office de Tourisme to get a map and maybe a place to stay. They phoned a hotel, booked us a room, and pointed us in the general direction of the hotel. We now had to find the hotel sans GPS, sans sense of direction, but no worries, we had a paper map.

Going up one of the streets we needed to turn right but it was not allowed to so I made a u-turn, maybe there would be a spot to turn, now left, and that’s where things started going downhill, literarily and figuratively speaking. There wasn’t a left and I ended up in the Tunnel de le Croix-Rousse. What we of course did not know at that stage was that there are two rivers (Saone and Rhone) that run through Lyon and this tunnel makes its way underneath both and deposits you a long way from where you entered it. And on the way back it winds along a different path, and there are a myriad of one-ways and turnoffs and… and… I’m not even going to try and explain it, check it out on Google Maps.

That fatal night of 10 September 2003 we drove up and down one-way streets, always in the wrong direction, we drive in circles where there weren’t any, we found ourselves sometimes to the west of the Saone, sometimes to the east of the Rhone, and sometimes in-between the two, we simply could not find a road that would take us to our hotel.

I cussed like a sailor; I drove like a sailor, made u-turns at every turn. It was 22:00 when I made yet another illegal u-turn manoeuvre which necessitated that I reverse – by now I only knew high speed – and backed up into a low cement pillar. The car came to a sudden scraping stop. I inspected the damage and it could have been worse, but scrapes and scratches and some black and brown paint was mixed in with the red of the cars’. Oh shit! I again cursed Croix-Rousse, for the umpteenth time.

It was 21:45 when we had the hotel in our sight but we kept going around it in a seemingly never-ending one way street and that’s when I took the final decision, go against the traffic, of which there was none at that particular point, and slipped into the slipway of the hotel. Mission accomplished. We checked in at around 22:00, having spent in excess of four hours to drive the probably three kilometres from the Office de Tourisme… and from there the vow never to return.

Anyway, after we had unloaded our stuff and some of my frustrations, we went for supper. I remember ducking into a small supermarket and buying an ice-cold 500ml Heineken, and just like a bum, I sat down right there on the pavement sucking away at my bottle.

After supper we ambled back to the hotel and that’s when we saw this life sized mural upon a building, it was amazing, we just stared and stared, taking in all the details, it looked so real. And today, we found that very same building and the mural still looks exactly the same as it did 14 years ago, take a look at the pictures below.

It was time for some shade and a shandy which we found at the Brasserie Chante Cler. After catching our breath there we hopped back on the metro, got off at Hotel de Ville and found the area around there mesmerising with many little shops and restaurants housed in beautiful old buildings. We will be sure to go back there for a more detailed look around.

 

 

 

We took a breather in the beautiful rustic gardens of the Musée des Beaux-Arts (Museum of Fine Arts) but refrained from going in, there will be another day for that. Gathering our thoughts and senses we got back on the metro and rode until we got to a stop where many people got off, so we did too. But, there was nothing of interest in the immediate vicinity and in any case, Adri wanted to go to the Parc de la Tête d’Or, which lies in the opposite direction of where we were heading.

 

 

 

Now you’re supposed to validate your travel ticket by inserting it into the validation machine situated at the entrance of your chosen public transport. Having a 24 hour ticket we didn’t think it necessary but for some reason I validated ours when we boarded the tram to the park. And would you believe, on that very same journey the ticket police boarded the tram for an inspection. One guy was marched off the tram, patted down, all the while proclaiming his innocence. The tram pulled away while he was still explaining, the people had paces to go.

After our police inspected journey it was a short walk to the park which was well worth the visit. The park has lovely walkways and large grassy areas under tall trees for picnics, there’s a mini zoo with a few animals doing duty, a lake where you can paddle your boat to your heart’s desire… one could easily spend a day here reading and relaxing, and I think we will.

 

 

 

After a bus ride back to the Part Dieu train station and short walk we got home around 21:00, thoroughly tired after a thoroughly enjoyable day.

Home