Lyon Love

These are from my last week in Lyon. I'm going to make a separate post for the last day because it deserves its own post, but these need some love too. And there's plenty to go around.

Sliced bread and the best thing since sliced bread.

Ross, my home skillet, bodyguard, guinea pig French student, and vegetarian food hunting buddy. Also, he's very photogenic. This is one of my proudest portraits.

St. Jean from Guillotière. The area around St. Jean is one of the most beautiful parts of Lyon, and Guillotière is the most terrifying. Lyon is a two-faced goddess.

More Caprese salad. It's delicious, but sometimes it's the only vegetarian thing on the menu and it gets old. But it's so pretty!

We went cheese tasting. It was air-conditioned, which was nice, but the odor of feet was miasmic. The cheese, of course, was delicious, although the lady explaining everything said there was a certain bacterial risk involved in the eating of said cheese. About three days later and whaddaya know but a lot of us of us had this bizarre sore throat/red tongue thing. Luckily, it cleared up with about a gallon of mouthwash.

And thus commenceth the cheese porn.

Look at it!

You know you want to.

Speaking of fatty delicious things...I went to McDonald's in Europe more in a month than I go in a year in the States. I have neither regrets nor shame.

Also, they have bendy straws. Who knew?

Little garden in Parc de la Tête d'Or. This is a pretty typical French garden, characterized by what I stupidly like to call "ordre en désordre." There is a distinct plan there, and it's definitely there because somebody put it there, but it has a wild look about it, and there aren't a lot of empty spaces in between as are common in American gardens.

As I was walking through the park I saw a huge row of magnolia trees and squeaked a little. In addition to being my favorite flower, the magnolia reminds me of home.

Huge group of deer napping in the shade. Did I mention that the Parc de la Tête d'Or is also a zoo?

I'm not really a fan of zoos because I can't stand seeing things caged, but this one is the best-kept zoo I've ever seen. The animals have a lot of space and seem very well cared for.

The turtles were all out basking in the sunshine.

Real Watusi cattle.

Nile crocodile.

Our mission at the zoo was to interview an animal and write it up, so I interviewed a porcupine.

He was sleeping and thus wasn't particularly interested in speaking to me, so I made some stuff up.

The actual sushi place where I had my first sushi (which is very popular in France). It was avocado and cucumber, and it was super gross because of the seaweed. Fishy things nauseate me. But hey, I tried.

Translation: "Stay alive. Drink Orangina." These are all over the city, and they give me the wiggins. They're of all different kinds of animals, and just ew. (Don't let this put you off trying Orangina, though. It's delicious. The first week of class, I survived off of Orangina and adrenaline.)

Me and Marta in front of Louis XIV's representation of the Rhône in Bellecour. I love this girl.

Merve, the Turkish beauty. She is a complete sweetheart and she knows way more about American television than I do.

Yes, I am that immature. What's the point of being alive if you can't make fun of Louis XIV?

Funny story: So Marta, Merve and myself were out on the town looking for a place to eat real Lyonnais cuisine, and we found this one place near Bellecour. Only problem was, there was nothing without meat on the menu. Absolutely nothing. So we asked the guy and he brought out this chalkboard and all they had was this fresh vegetable plate. And he told me that in this plate, there was "rien sauf les légumes" (nothing but vegetables) so I ordered it. And that tiny little bowl of stuff at the top of the plate looked like baba ghanouj so I spread a massive glob of it onto my bread without even thinking and took a huge bite of it, only to discover it was puréed anchovies. And if you know me, you know that my loathing for all things piscine boils hotter than the Acheron. I started feeling sick almost instantly and about thirty minutes later I found myself vomiting into a trash can in a train station in front of about a hundred people. Yum. Lesson learned: when you want to tell someone you're a vegetarian in Lyon, you must tell them every single individual thing you don't eat. It happened another time when I told someone I didn't eat meat so they brought me a merguez sandwich. And then I said "That looks like meat," to which they replied "That's not meat, that's sausage."

An alley full of restaurants right off of Bellecour. It's always lit up at night and it's exceptionally beautiful.

Jussieu. It looks nice, but it's actually a little hell.

My tramway stop.

Université Lyon I in Villeurbanne, very close to where I lived. Villeurbanne has a lot of much newer buildings, and most of them are concrete, giving the whole place a very grey, brutal cast.

Villeurbanne is also kind of ghetto-y.

I passed by this graffiti every day in the tramway. Translation: "Concrete, concrete, concrete...even in the heads." I don't think anybody could ever like Villeurbanne.

Sweet, sweet Los Angeles.

As you can probably surmise, the Euronaut has finally returned home, but she has not yet fulfilled her promises of photos and stories. She plans to post these during the upcoming days. This blog is far from over, so keep your eyes peeled.

Paris Wrapup

Bastille Day

Me being an idiot for your enjoyment.

Arles and Nîmes

I know this is super late and I'm in Paris now, but I want stuff on this blog to be in order so I'm posting it in order. These are from the second day of the Avignon trip.

At the hostel. Ross filled a cereal bowl with coffee about three times. Yet he still always looks sleepy.

Random snail orgy sculpture, which reminds me of my fish tank at home because my snails have snail orgies too.

The Maison Carrée in Nîmes. Built in 16 BCE, it is one of the best preserved Roman temples to be found anywhere in the territory of the former Roman empire. The reason why it's so well preserved is because it was rededicated as a Christian church in the fourth century following Rome's adoption of Christianity as the official state religion. There was a widespread destruction of beautiful old temples like this because they were considered pagan, but this one stayed because it was used as a church.

The ever-gorgeous, brave, spunky and witty Valen, and Ross, the empathetic, brilliant, and sleepy Southern gentleman. (I will have to check the family tree, but I am almost certain we are actually cousins of some sort.)

Marta la Catalana. She is so beautiful it's hard for me not to take a thousand pictures of her.

Maison Carrée again.

They don't put ice in drinks here very often, so I kept cool with about eight thousand blue slushies. (Well, they're called "granita" here, but I think "granita" is way too pretentious a name for blue frozen sugar water.) I don't know what it is, but I have a hard time resisting blue food.

In Arles, everyone is obsessed with bulls for some reason. And cattle in general. And ew. (I give cattle their space.)

Spices at the open-air market.

The French are passionate about sausage. [insert innuendo as you please]

Massive freaking paella swarming with flies. Ew.

Dirty, dirty onions.

Tomates cœurs de bœuf

O Mamma, piscia fritta baccalà! (Yes, that's Italian.)

Massive freaking cheese.

Actual headcheese. I nearly hurled.

Anti-immigration poster.

Me and the actual Mediterranean. I swam in that. It was like a bathtub only saltier and I floated a lot, and I laughed so much because apparently the Mediterranean magically makes everything funnier.

Théâtre antique d'Arles. It was completed in the first century BCE.

Because I thought the pillars were awesome.

Me and some really old rocks.

The Arènes d'Arles. Built around 90 AD, this beast hosted a ton of chariot races and bloody hand to hand battles for the entertainment of the masses. Yum.

I'm told that 20,000 people could fit in there.

Same place, different shot.

I mostly just took a picture of this because in the neon sign, "Pinus" looks like "Anus." I have the sense of humor of a thirteen year old boy, and I am unashamed.

Kitty! Granny Jane, he looked so much like Piggy up close that I nearly thought it was him.

The language above the bust is not French. It is Occitan, or Langue d'oc, a Romance language spoken in southern France. It is an official language of Catalonia and is very closely related to Catalan, which is the mother tongue of my good friend Marta.

There's stuff like this all over the place in the buildings in Arles (and in France in general).

Church façade in Arles. There are carvings all over these and they're all unique. Even things you think are repeating often carry different facial expressions.

This almost reminds me of something you might find in southeast Asia on a Hindu temple.

Sea of sunflowers on the way back to Lyon.

Bastille Day fireworks in Lyon after we got back that evening. We were super late getting back and I had to charge my phone in order to get any pictures at all, so my friend Ross and I missed most of them, sadly. However, when I was on the tramway back to my place, something rather more interesting than fireworks happened. The thing was so crowded I could barely breathe, and this drunk lady got on with her kid, who appeared to be about four years old and who was also drunk. The kid was laughing and yelling really loud and this guy started shouting at the mom because of her terrible negligence. I mean, seriously. Who lets their four year old get drunk? That's abuse. But anyways. There were so many people on the tramway that people took sides and a massive fight broke out, and since I could not move I was stuck smack dab in the middle of it. And if you know me, you know that I don't start fights, but I don't let people shove me around if there's already one going on. I came out with a few bruises, but you should have seen the other guys. I didn't take Tae Kwon Do for nothing. And there you have it.