An American in Lyon: A Novel

Yeah, you read that right. We're in Lyon now--surprise! And apologies for not having updated again before now, so to make it up to you, I'll try to catch you up.

Well, we went through our short time in Paris with a bang. We saw everything a proper tourist should see: la Tour Eiffel, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre, Notre Dame, Les Invalides, the Seine, Parisian cafes, Montmartre, Sacre Coeur, etc. And as much as we walked--and believe me, we walked a lot--we didn't have to do as much walking as we could have, thanks to my professor for a lovely tip about something called the Batobus, which is a bus on the river that takes tourists to a lot of the major attractions in Paris. You can get an unlimited pass for two or three days to get on and off the boat as many times as you like. However, you can also buy a Batobus ticket in conjunction with another company, L'OpenTour, to get a real bus to take you to the landlocked monuments. So that's what we did!

I've always enjoyed speaking French whenever I can at home, especially with my sister. But it's really different when you're the only one in your group than can understand anything a French person says and everyone is relying on you. I have to confess, I miss the days when I didn't have to speak French just to get some food (although it has been very good food!).

So we left Paris yesterday via the TGV. Supposedly, train travel is nice and leisurely. You can relax in your private compartment with your companions, and if you get hungry, you can go to the dinner car and buy yourself a meal or a sandwich. And when you get near to school, you change into your wizard's robes.

Or maybe that was just my wishful thinking.

Instead, with our (my) 400 pounds of luggage, we hustled our way into the Gare Lyon in Paris an hour early so that we could figure out what to do. Remember, we were as new to this ball game as you are right now. Which is not a fun situation to be in when you're thrown in with a bunch of players who don't even speak your language. So Dad found a helpful employee who guided us through the process.

Basically, the French like waiting until the last minute for a lot of things. Apparently, scheduling where trains are leaving from is one of those things. The process of getting on a train at a TGV station goes like this: get to the station, find out which of the two terminals your train will be coming to, and wait. "Wait for what?" you say. Well, my dear readers, I shall tell you. You wait to find out what gate you are at. When do you find out? Anywhere from twenty minutes before to five minutes before your train is scheduled to leave. Fortunately for us, our train's location showed up right at 20 minutes until departure time. So we found our train, bumbled our way into our car, and pathetically asked a nice French lady for help finding our seats. As she spoke no English, she just pointed to our seats, but it was fine in the end.

For her.

Her seat was in the very front of our car. Our seats were in the back. And it seemed that a little old lady and her husband were in two of our seats. After some rapid-fire French between our helper lady and the wife, things seemed to be getting sorted out. The wife was not, in fact, actually the man's wife. She was his cousin, coming to see him off on his trip back to Lyon, and she was only helping him get settled in on the train. So off she went, and we found our seats facing each other at a little table by the window of our car, and everything seemed so quaint and delightful, even the little old French man named Jean-Paul whose seat was next to ours.

But, oh my gosh, that little old man loved to talk. As he said it, "I love to talk." No truer statement has ever been made, my friends. I learned this over the entire two and a half hour trip, during which we (he) discussed religion, politics, French celebrities, and Jean-Paul's life story. We (he) was interrupted once when a woman from the front of the car came back to tell him to "stop talking! You're perturbing the other passengers!"

There was some excitement on our track because a person committed suicide on our train tracks (not on our train, though, thank goodness), so our train got delayed about half an hour. It was a little shocking how blasé the French were about the suicide, but I suppose no one really could have done anything about it from where we were.

Anyway, we are now finishing up our time in Lyon. When we got here, our travel agent had booked us a rental car, so we picked that up. It turned out to be a manual transmission Passat, a nice car if you're used to manual. Unfortunately, my dad hadn't driven manual in over twenty years. To top it off, all of the instructions or switches were in an odd combination of French and German. Long story short: we ended up stalling at the exit of the parking garage for about ten minutes while Dad fought with the parking brake. We eventually solved the situation after the parking garage attendant (who spoke only French and apparently broken Spanish) came out to see what the problem was. Dad, who can never remember the proper way to ask this in French said, “¿Parler inglés?" We got the parking brake off after the attendant repeatedly asked Dad to put the car in "uno"--first gear.

We drove around for a while so that Dad could relearn how to drive manual transmission. Dad seemed to think the best policy was to accelerate if anything seemed to be going wrong with the car. When accelerating seemed like it would be fatal, Dad slammed on the brakes instead. Two moments stand out in all of this: once when we were stopped at a light on one of the few hills in Lyon, Dad somehow had his foot on all three pedals: clutch, brake, and accelerator. Our tires were doing a lot of squealing at this point, but we weren't going anywhere until we got a green light and our car took off like a rocket. The other memorable moment happened when Dad was having trouble deciding which way to turn at an intersection. Our car kept lurching so much that the driver behind us got out to check his bumper to see if he had hit us. I'm pretty sure he didn't.

So after all that hard work on my Dad's part--45 minutes of it--we made it to our hotel. Which, as it turned out, was right next door to the train station. 174 paces away, to be exact. Poor Dad, all that hard work, and we didn't even need the car.

For the rest of the day, Mom and Dad went out and got dinner while I got some desperately-needed quiet time in the hotel room, and then the three of us explored the humongous shopping mall across the street.

Today was the best day by far. Mom and Dad woke up early to go running, and I got to have some more quiet time to myself as I showered and got ready for the day. Our plan was to go see the Basilica of Notre Dame de Fourvière and the local Cathédral de St. Jean. We bought all-day metro passes and set off on our journey. When we got to the cathedral, I realized I forgot my camera today. I KNOW.

The cathedral was beautiful, like all cathedrals here. We looked around and admired the stained glass, and Mom and I picked out some postcards for people back home. We then set off for the Wonder on the Hill, the basilica. It looked like quite a climb to us, and we turned out to be right. Being the model companion I am, I didn't complain at all...

But all the hard work paid off in the end. We walked into the church, and it literally took my breath away. I have never seen something so beautiful in my entire life. Every single surface of the church is covered by some sort of ornamentation. The walls have huge mural-mosaics, and the floors are covered in mosaics too. There is a huge painting on the rear wall of the church of the Virgin and Child, and the ceiling is covered with angels and saints. Everything is gold and blue for Mary, and it all holds some sort of symbolism for the Church. It doesn't seem real, even when you're there looking directly at it. I can't describe the beauty of this place, and the pictures can't capture it; I just know I want to go back.

Simply put: I love Lyon, and I wish we had another day or two here!