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.