Searching for the future – Page 7

Provence Part One – The Commune of Lorgues

Part 1 – The commune of Lorgues

Our month in the beautiful city of Lyon completed, the time to start the main business of our trip had arrived. We were both beginning to feel at ease with the language after two weeks of intensive training at Inflexyon, shopping in French had begun to seem quite natural, and chatting with the locals was becoming much easier. Now we were able to start looking around us and begin that search for the all-elusive perfect nesting place.

Our stop in Lyon had been a great success, having found the city even more delightful than we had expected. However, as many of the people we met there quickly confirmed, it was probably not the ideal location for two people who were hoping to live in a warm(-ish) climate. The September weather we had experienced there was lovely, but the general message was that we might not be quite so appreciative of the winters. To make the point, it was raining heavily as we left Lyon behind us that first day in October, driving our brand new short-term lease car, a well-equipped and very comfortable Peugeot 308 diesel. We headed south through quite murky weather, along the A7 autoroute following the Rhône valley, as we anticipated our next destination, the village of Lorgues, located in the midst of wineries and olive trees in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region.

Provence is one of those places that has been written about so often, and is almost revered by many, and yet neither of us had been there for any length of time. It appeared to have a lot of potential, the climate is temperate, the countryside was said to be beautiful, and culture and history abounds. With so many expats having made their homes there over the years, it surely must be worthy of a visit by a couple of European retirees, disappointed by the Californian Dream, and looking for a place to re-connect to their roots. So we had found a rental apartment in Lorgues, which seemed to be fairly centrally located between sea and mountain, the famous Riviera destinations to the east and Roman antiquities to the west. The sun started to appear among the clouds as we arrived in the late afternoon, and, pleased to be out in the countryside once more after a month of city dwelling, we found our new temporary home easily on the edge of the village, in a small gated community of similar apartments in two three-storey buildings. We had to wait half an hour for the cleaning lady to arrive with the key and let us in; but once the car was unloaded, and we’d had our supper of left-over groceries from Lyon, we settled down to our six-week term of Provençal life.

The first sight of our new Provençal home. Sadly, our view did not include the nice garden and the pool.

There is a lot to see in Provence, chic holiday resorts, tourist trap casino cities, market towns full of history, ancient small villages perched on hilltops high above green valleys, and acres and acres and acres of vineyards interspersed with olive groves. Lorgues fitted somewhere between the market town and ancient village category, far enough north of the A8, the main east-west autoroute, to be relatively unaffected by traffic speeding towards the Italian border, but far enough south to be easily accessible and out of the more extreme hilly regions to the north. It seemed to be, and indeed proved to be, an ideal location to have all of Provence within a comfortable day’s drive. However our first day in the village was all foot-powered, as we took our first stroll around our neighbourhood, including a stop for our daily baguette at what turned out to be the only boulangerie with Sunday opening hours. Then, getting down immediately to the business in hand, we included some window-shopping at the half dozen agents immobiliers in the main street.

The smallest kitchen area I have ever used apart from one in a motor-home!

Our open plan living/dining room. Actually there isn’t a dining table at all!

The apartment that we had booked through the FlipKey website was adequate but much smaller than we had expected, which just demonstrated how deceptive descriptions and photographs can be. The view from our balcony at the back of the building was a distinct disappointment, in the shade all day long and looking straight at the back of a very run-down building that housed the local grape and olive crushing plant, which became noisily active several times during our stay. We were also disappointed to discover that our mobile phone signal was too weak to be of any use when downloading e-mails from the internet or making the comforting Skype phone calls to family and friends at home; and the “café with internet facilities just around the corner” had very erratic opening hours, and wasn’t exactly the kind of place we would have wanted to spend a lot of time chatting to the grandkids. This was our own fault, because we were fully aware of the lack of internet in the apartment when we made the booking, but your scribe had rather foolishly chosen to ignore this lack of what has become such a necessary adjunct to the comfort of our modern travelling lives. Still, by late afternoon the next day, a 40 kilometre round trip to the local Orange outlet in Draguignan, our nearest town of any size, had us returning happily connected to the world again with a new mini-SIM in our IPad and a contract that seemed to give us plenty of gigabytes to play with for the next three months, though we were soon to learn how many of the bytes one Skype call consumes!

The Var department – Lorgues is just slightly north-east of the exact centre.

The local tourist office, very conveniently situated just round the corner from our gateway, was staffed by a couple of very friendly local ladies who gave us lots of good information about the places we should visit in the Draguignan arrondissement of the Var department, and we came away well armed with maps and guides.

To find your way around in France, and to understand a bit about the local politics, it is helpful to have an understanding of how the administration of the country is divided up. There are twelve mainland régions, each region levying its own taxes, and having direct responsibilities for high school education and discretionary powers over infrastructural spending such as public transport, universities and assistance to local businesses. Regions are then subdivided into the ninety-seven main administrative divisions of France, the départements. The departmental seats of government for each department, the préfectures, are usually in a town reasonably centrally placed, historically nominally accessible to all corners of the department within twenty-four hours on horseback. However, slightly surprisingly, the coastal port city of Toulon is the prefecture for the Var department. Further subdivisions of the departments are the arondissements, such as Draguignan, the town of that name also being the seat of the sous-préfecture of the arondissement. Each arondissement is then further subdivided into cantons, the chief purpose of which are to serve as constituencies for the election of members of the General Councils of each department. Within cantons there may be several communes, France’s fourth administrative level. Lorgues is one of fifty-eight communes in the arondissement of Draguignan, and one of five communes in the canton of Vidauban. Communes are roughly the equivalent of civil townships and incorporated municipalities in the United States, and resemble urban districts and rural parishes in the United Kingdom. Each commune has a maire (mayor), a conseil municipal (town council), and a mairie or town hall. Amazingly, a legacy from the French Revolution means that all 36,552 communes, with the exception of the commune of Paris, have more or less the same legislative powers over such things as the local police force and emergency services, even though the population of communes can vary from two million – Paris – to towns of ten thousand, to a hamlet of just10 persons. However, as one might expect, the maximum allowable pay for mayors and deputy mayors, and other financial items such as municipal campaign limits, do vary according to the population echelon into which each commune falls! Lorgues, though, was a larger than average commune of nearly nine thousand people.

Entering Vieux Lorgues through the narrow passage above Place du Revelin.

The original small fortified town around which this community has grown, dates back to the 11^th and 12^th centuries, and is still entered through one of the several old “portes”, or gates. The old town is a small maze of medieval streets uphill from the present day main street, Boulevard Georges Clemenceau, and Cours de la Republique. As one approaches the village the most prominent feature is the 18^th century collegial St-Martin church. Locals told us it had a very impressive interior, but this we never saw as the building was closed to the public during our stay, due to construction work. Every Tuesday there is a large market all along the main street and extending into Rue de l’Église and down Avenue de Toulon. Selling pretty well every type of household accessory, a wide selection of clothing and lots of meat, cheese and fruit and vegetables, one might never need to shop anywhere else if one was not too choosy! A Casino Supermarché, an Intermarché Super and a small Bio store completed the basic grocery shopping options; for the more selective gourmand there was a half dozen boulangeries and pâtisseries. The main street was mostly cafés and restaurants and the aforementioned agents immobiliers, all very much oriented towards the expat and tourist community, of which we were part of course. The local expats came out in force on market days and Saturdays, when one heard as much English as French being spoken.

In line with our intent to live like locals as much as possible, we rarely dined out in the village. Our first experience was a wonderful meal with friends on a damp wet Friday evening, at Chez Vincent (sadly, I see, now under new owners and renamed Chez Flo.) Superbly cooked confit de canard together with delicious starters, yummy desserts and a very nice Chateau les Crostes rouge earned it a well deserved five-star review on Trip Advisor. Then on our last evening in the village we treated ourselves to another very tasty meal in the quaint ambience of the interior of an old olive mill. La Table du Moulin had received mixed reviews, but the unique venue and the warmth of the Maître D and the Chef when, out of hours, we popped our heads inside as we passed by one afternoon, tempted us to find out for ourselves, and we were far from disappointed; it turned out to be an enjoyable parting song to our stay in Lorgues. Of course, we did enjoy the café culture more often, finding the temptations of mille feuilles and tartes aux pommes irresistible more times than we would like to admit, stopping by to rest your scribe’s weary knees on our regular walks to the Bio store and our favourite boulangeries.

Five days after our arrival and we realized we had explored our commune pretty thoroughly and the time had come to start discovering what our département, Var, had to offer. . . .

Lyon – finale – A city of dance, murals and street art

Lyon has a lot of cultural activities going on throughout the year and during our stay in September, it was the turn of the 17^e Bienniale de La Danse, with everything from impromptu displays of break dancing and hip-hop on the verandah along the front of L’Opera to more formal concerts at a variety of venues. Through our studies at L’Inflexyon we were able to attend what was perhaps one of the stranger events, a piece called simply Corbeaux (Crows), staged in the Roman Théatre des 3 Gauls, built in 19A.D. at the foot of La Croix Rousse. In this somewhat bizarre performance a troupe of twenty-five performers from Morocco, all dressed simply in black, put themselves into a trance through a choreographed trembling of their heads and the continuous chanting of a psalmodie. I don’t believe we were alone in finding the spectacle completely incomprehensible. However, it was eerie to be sitting where delegations from the 60 Gallic tribes who paid allegiance to their Roman conquerors, would also have sat and watched the type of entertainment much favoured by the imperial cult in those days, and, perhaps, finding those games equally bizarre! On a more somber note, the amphitheatre was also the scene, in 177AD of the first sacrifices of Christian martyrs on behalf of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who treated Christianity as a ‘problem’ to be dealt with ‘locally’, by his subordinates!

No description of Lyon would be complete without a mention of the endless array of street art. From officially sanctioned murals such as the amazing full building works of a bookstore and an apartment dwelling occupied by Lyon’s famous characters on every balcony, to celebrity murals such as that of Paul Bocuse, and lots of very amusing graffiti, solid sculptures like a pair of legs or half a bicycle sticking out from walls and small pieces of mosaic tucked here and there. One street in Vieux Lyon has shields painted with family coats of arms hanging from wall brackets at just about every building. The observant eye will see sculptures of strange creatures hanging off window sills and beautiful brass knockers adorn many a doorway. It’s almost as if it would be a greater challenge to find a street bereft of such art and artifacts.

Thus our month in Lyon was well occupied, the September weather was delightful, with just a little light rain on a couple to days to freshen the air and make the streets shine. We reached the end of our stay with a long list of places and events we hadn’t seen and for which we should have made time, but it is always good to have reasons enough to go back again to such a lovely city some day hence. And then there is all the surrounding countryside with the Beaujolais vineyards to north and west, other fine cities such as Grenoble and Geneva, and the foothills of the Alps a short drive away to the east, giving us yet more incentives to return. It probably isn’t somewhere that we will consider living one day, for from all accounts the winter weather is probably more severe than this couple of South Californian softies want to live with.

And with that thought in mind our next destination was 400 kilometres closer to the equator, still in France, but bordering the attractions of the Mediterranean sea, a region of the country much eulogized by a host of writers in the past, and for many years one of the essential elements of that soul-searching, educational rite of passage known as the “Grand Tour” by so many artists, writers, and carefree young gentlemen, and ladies, of means in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; I refer, of course, to “La Provence”.

Lyon – part five – City of Silk

During the Renaissance, Lyon became very active in the silk trade and this resulted in the city becoming an important industrial town during the 19^th century. The main silk district is on the steep slopes of Croix Rousse, uphill from our house of learning at L’Inflexyon. We walked up the many steps one evening and at the top found a neighbourhood very different from where we were staying at Les Toits de Lyon; it appeared to be quite working-class and not ‘posh’ at all, as we had thought it might have been, being in such a wonderful location with such great views over the city. We were too late in the day to visit the two or three old silk factories that remain open to the public, so, after a brief wander around, we trotted back down the long wide ‘staircase’ of Montée de la Grande-Côte, and into more familiar territory.

However, we did come across other reminders of the silk-trading past of the city during our wanderings at other times. Several small boutiques in an area close to the Opera, such as La Boutique Ineska, were displaying some simply beautiful diaphanous silk dresses which looked wonderful when modeled by my long-limbed bride; in another gallery we visited, we were able to see the process of silk screen printing that produced the wonderful patterns of those garments; and in a small shop on rue de Boeuf, Brochier Soieries 1890, La Boutique, we received, from the very accommodating proprietor, a fascinating demonstration of a small version of the Jacquard machine, invented in 1801, that automated the weaving of the gorgeous patterns in silk that we associate with furnishing fabrics and the richer materials used in the aristocratic gowns and cloaks of old.

The silk industry is also associated with some of the more unusual features of Lyonnaise architecture. With the older parts of the city being built on and around fairly steep hills, most of the main streets of old Lyon run across the slopes, rather than up and down them. To give people living and working on the upper slopes easier direct access to the river, the famous traboules, a series of arched walkways, underground passages and staircases leading down the slopes, were incorporated into the buildings. Whilst there were lots of these traboules, not that many are nowadays easily accessible to the public, especially the underground tunnels which are now mostly closed off and used for storage.

All the same, we were lucky enough in our choice of learning establishment, to find ourselves directly next-door to a fine example of this style of construction;

Passage Thiaffait starts with stairs down from rue Burdeau and ends up opening onto rue René Leynaud. Several of the really rather elegant staircase traboules can also be seen on and around rue du Boeuf (such as La Tour Rose) and rue Saint-Jean in Vieux Lyon. Although we didn’t pursue our research into traboules any further, we came across several guidebooks and many websites dedicated to the subject [www.lyontraboules.net].

And the connection of traboules with the silk trade was . . . ? They provided safe and efficient passage for silk workers to get their wares to and from market unmarred [www.atlasobscura.com/places/traboules-secret-passages].

On finding somewhere to build a new nest . . .

My wife, Celine, and I, a couple of retired European expats, live a life in California that we both feel leaves a lot to be desired. So a few years ago we made the decision to start looking for another country to build our nest anew. As regular readers of International Living, we started our search in a couple of the Central and South American countries that so many writers had been enthusing about, namely Costa Rica and Ecuador. Both had their attributes, but we quickly realised that what we really wanted was to become Europeans in Europe once again, and be back amongst the culture, the history, and people with whom we would have more in common than we do with our Californian neighbours. So, with good memories from earlier visits to the country, and French being our strongest of the romance languages, last September we set off on a six-month intensive study of southern France from Provence in the east across to Aquitaine in the west, with an excursion into Spanish Basque country and short, unscheduled, side trips to the Italian Riviera and Spain’s Costa Brava.

This was, however, no extended holiday, for we planned to spend four to six weeks in three or four destinations where, as far as it is possible to do so in short-term rented accommodation, we would live like locals, buying our supplies in the local shops and markets, and also scout around the local areas to get the bigger picture.

We arrived without clearly defining what we wanted from a nesting site, preferring to discover what would attract us both. And so we spent six months exposing ourselves to a variety of locales, getting excited by some more than others. Occasionally, we would get perilously close to making rushed decisions about buying properties, whilst totally ignoring our promises to ourselves to do nothing rash, to rent for a year before deciding to buy, to always seek English speaking advice and guidance, and to be absolutely certain how much we could afford before making an offer!

We started our journey with a month in Lyon where we had found a good school of languages to bone up on our French; it wasn’t, however, a potential nesting site due to its rather cold winter weather. Our nest-hunting really began with six weeks in Provence, but they passed by without temptation; we simply never found anywhere that made us want to settle. It was in Ospedaletti, just outside San Remo, the self styled capital of la Riviera de las Flores, at the western end of the Italian Riviera, where Delilah first tried her tricks. We had a week to fill between our pre-booked stay in Lorgues, a Provence village popular with expats, and a three week house-sit in Montpellier, and had decided to spend it exploring the nearest bit of Italy.

We had found an apartment in Ospedaletti, just 30m from the shore with a spacious balcony and a spectacular view over the Mediterranean. We were entranced, and not just with the view. The town itself had a certain faded elegance and charm, and was wonderfully unspoilt after the developmental excesses we had seen all along the French Riviera to the west. We drove into San Remo a couple of times, a city that seemed to tick many of our boxes, culture, architecture, and good shopping, and had the air of an honest working town without the overt touristic ostentatiousness of its French neighbours. The hook had been set and it only took a few words with our Italian landlord, who just happened to be in the real-estate business, before he was driving us around showing us what could be bought for the €350,000 we thought we could afford. And after three ‘duds’, too much renovation required, lousy view, no parking space, and one very nice apartment that, unfortunately, was way outside our budget, we explained to Simone that perhaps we should just ‘keep in touch’. We liked the location but none of his offerings really suited our needs. But Simone was not to be put off quite so easily.

Now that he understood better what we were looking for – somewhat surprising as we still weren’t really sure ourselves – Simone had one more place that he would like to show us which he was absolutely certain would be just perfect. And so the following day, on the morning of our departure, he took us for a short walk along the rocky shoreline, around a slight promontory and there before us was a three storey building set in amongst a few pine trees. The apartment in question was on the first floor, had two large bedrooms, two bathrooms, a decent living room, an adequate kitchen opening onto a small garden, and a long enclosed verandah looking straight at the sea with more or less the same lovely views we had been enjoying for the last week. And the price was pretty well exactly what we had in mind. Of course we thought it was wonderful. Sure we would need to spend some money refurbishing the kitchen, but that was work I could easily handle myself. We would have our own parking space directly beneath the verandah, it was well off the main road, there was no public access to the property, and there were only two other occupants in the building so no housing association complications. There seemed to be some question as to whether or not the windows around the verandah had been the subject of planning permission, but the other two apartments had been similarly modified and no questions had been asked. A friend of Simone’s owned one of the other apartments, and, surprise, Simone also knew the seller very well. It all sounded very good and was our ideal nest in so many ways. To say we were tempted is to put it mildly, until the bombshell landed. The owner had already received one offer at the asking price, but would accept a cash offer if we wanted to seal the deal. Our minds raced furiously as we mentally worked out that we could indeed raise the cash, but at the same time little niggling doubts began to foment.

It was really just as well that we were leaving later that morning. So as we walked back to Simone’s apartment and he helped us carry our suitcases to the car, we explained our dilemma and agreed we would get back to him that evening, once we had arrived in Montpellier. But in our hearts we knew we had to calm down and not be blinded by such a little gem of a home. We talked about little else during our drive back along the A8 autoroute, and by the time we were arriving in the outskirts of Montpellier as dusk fell, we knew that we had been very close to making a huge mistake. We had not spoken to an English speaking solicitor, we had only a vague knowledge of the Italian system of buying and selling property, we weren’t even one hundred percent sure of the exchange value of our savings in UK and USA. But it had been a real shock for us to learn how impetuous we could be.

Fishing boats on the beach at Calella de Palafrugell

You’d think after that we would have been far more principled in our house-hunting escapades, but you’d be wrong to think that we would control our instincts better. Our next short, unplanned stay was a week in the pretty, old fishing village of Calella de Palafrugell on the Spanish Costa Brava. Your scribe had stayed there with his parents some fifty years previously and was surprised as well as delighted to find that it had not suffered the ravages of over-development that is such an epidemic along much of the Spanish Mediterranean coast. The small beaches in the middle of the village and the many isolated rocky coves where I remembered swimming in the clear azure sea with my father, were all just as delightful as ever. Walking the narrow footpath twisting its way among the rocky outcrops between the coves along the shoreline around the bay and on into the neighboring village of Llafranc, was a blissful way of getting our daily exercise. Even Palafrugell, the town four kilometres inland, where we would have to go for all our shopping and medical needs, was pleasant enough. Open countryside was all around, the handsome city of Girona was only an hour’s drive inland, and the port of Palamos just a few kilometres down the coast. And Calella itself was so wonderfully clean and quiet, actually rather too quiet we realised as the days went by, and the view of the sea from our balcony was again beautiful even though this time the sea was further away. But wouldn’t it be a wonderful place to live, we kept saying to each other. No tourists for nine or ten months of the year, fine countryside all around, we simply had to make contact with the local real estate office, and just see what might be available. And so the process began once more, though we didn’t get quite so carried away this time. Again we chatted with our landlord, from whom we learned that nearly 75% of the properties in the village, were owned by Spaniards from big cities like Barcelona and Madrid, who came to Calella for holidays and weekends. So there was not much chance of having year-round friendly neighbours. But still we ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’, while ‘umming’ at the same time, as we weighed up the pros and cons of life in a small, but very beautiful, holiday community, still without the benefit of local legal knowledge and advice, and once again getting ourselves very excited about a place we had been in for less than a week.

Who wouldn’t want to live near a beach like this – Calella again, seemingly unchanged from sixty years ago!

They say about love that when it arrives you will know about it without question, that your instincts have a very real sense of having found the right life-partner. But, just like loving a person, loving a place still has to be given time to grow and develop gradually. All the same, it is just as easy to fall blindly in love with a beautiful environment, as it is to believe the person with whom you danced the previous night away is quite without fault.

So we determined to spend the rest of our six months being far more pragmatic when looking at properties. But, like “the best laid schemes o’mice an’ men” our good intentions did go a ‘wee bit awry’. Nothing really grabbed us during the next five weeks, on a home-exchange in a very small village in the foothills of the Pyrenees, where the December winds blew overly cool and big city culture was just too far away. But, as February and early spring arrived we found ourselves in Spanish Basque country staying in the little fishing port of Getaria, living in a very smart modern apartment high above a small sandy cove, enthralled by our view of the waves from the Bay of Biscay crashing on the rocks to right and left. There was an awful lot that was right about this environment. The village was tucked below a hillside atop of which began miles of green rolling countryside. The town of Zarautz, five minutes drive along the coast road, had all the amenities we could want, the beautiful small seaside city of San Sebastian was half an hour’s drive to the east and the much revitalized, port city of Bilbao, with all its culture, an hour to the west. The countryside was beautiful in all directions, and French Basque country just an hour away. And, the final Delilah touch, two or three of the apartments in our building were for sale. So we just had to go and see. We actually ended up looking at four apartments in the end. The first two weren’t quite right, and the next two were superb, but, sadly, way above our ‘budget’. And anyway, none of them had a garden, something which your scribe feels very strongly about.

Still, it was early days, and as we had several more days in the area we decided to investigate the property market in more depth; and that was when we discovered that single-family homes with small gardens are somewhat of a rarity in that part of Spain. It’s something to do with planning regulations, which severely restrict the sale of agricultural land for development, a virtue for one who loves the countryside more than bricks and mortar, but it does explain the Spanish obsession with high-rise apartment buildings that tend to spoil so many of the small fishing villages along the coast. You understand, by this stage we were starting to think a lot more carefully. But then again, if we were to sell our condo in California, then we could actually afford the loveliest of the penthouse duplex apartments in our building, and it did have a terrace large enough to grow quite a lot of plants and vegetables, and the views were beautiful, and it was such a friendly village and . . . and . . . so on.

The Getaria apartment building that really tempted us – the big blue glass fronted box at the right of the bay. Magnificent views out over the Bay of Biscay, and the sound of the Atlantic surf!

Yes, the tentacles of temptation were slowly drawing us in once again, and dangerous thoughts were becoming ever stronger. Something inside of me was beginning to feel a slight sense of failure, that our six months was drawing a blank; even after visiting and seeing so many beautiful places, we seemed to be unable to find that ideal nesting place. Would we ever do so?

There was still French Basque country to explore, which we were able to do from our base in Getaria. Hendaye and St.Jean de Luz were two small towns very close to the frontier, each of which in their own way, proved very attractive, and so we wasted no time in visiting two or three local ‘immobilieres’ (real estate agents). Their response was very positive, especially now that our ‘budget had risen to €500,000! We found the French Basque housing market to be very different from the Spanish. The concept of single-family homes is very much the norm and we were immediately able to visit four or five homes, all of which could have possibilities, but just two of which really made us stop and think very hard. The first, up one of the hills on the outskirts of Hendaye, was in many ways the most suitable property we had seen. Three spacious bedrooms, two bathrooms, a large open-plan kitchen/living room, beautiful Spanish mosaic floors everywhere, except for the oak floors in the bedrooms, a large southwest facing balcony with views towards both the mountains and the sea (unfortunately split by the outsize chimney of the house below!), a fair sized garden, an enormous undeveloped basement, large enough to subdivide into a dance floor, a workshop and a garage, a conversion-ready loft, and the price was within budget. By this stage though, we were being ultra-cautious, we needed to know more about living in Hendaye, in fact we needed to stick to our guns and rent for at least six months before we made a decision to purchase. So, rather dejectedly, we walked away from it.

We also visited St Jean de Luz and decided that it too was every bit as charming as we had read, but property prices in the town itself put it out of the range of even our ‘new’ budget. All the same, we continued looking, met a very helpful estate agent in Urrugne, a commune a few kilometres inland, who showed us a couple more houses, one of which was a beautifully built home in the countryside with a well kept garden and views of the mountains, being sold by an elderly couple who had built the home themselves some thirty years earlier. Again we had to turn away, and console ourselves with the knowledge that we had at least found an area we would happily return to one day and try the nest-renting process.

But then again, perhaps we should look at Italy more closely, and what about this little country of Portugal, which everyone says is such a fine place for retirement? And that, dear readers, will be another story.

Footnote: Looking for illustrations for this post has made me realise how difficult it is to take photographs that effectively convey the true sense of a place. We took a few thousand photographs during our travels but hardly a single one adequately shows you why we were so tempted. So when this article was published by Live and Invest Overseas I was quite relieved to see that they used stock photos. They also edited it in places, quite effectively if I’m honest!

Lyon – part four – A smörgåsbord of museums

Our time in Lyon was much more than language learning, food and markets. Among the seemingly limitless attractions in Lyon, we spent many enjoyable hours visiting just a sample of its wonderful museums.

At the ultra-modern end of the scale, there is the excellent Musée des Confluences. Built on reclaimed land at the point where the rivers Rhône and Saône come together, this highly futuristic, stainless steel and glass edifice houses a permanent four part exhibit on the Ascent of Man – Origines, Espèces, Sociétés and Éternités – as well as temporary exhibits, all of which were well designed, and beautifully presented. We hadn’t expected to spend the whole afternoon there but the combination of La Dance Moderne – a well choreographed series of videos and music on screens throughout a large hall, and an Exploration of the Antarctic with some quite amazing underwater film footage of penguins and seals, meant we had little time left for Les Chaussures de la Monde and Potieres d’Afrique, before grabbing a quick coffee and a snack in the unusual – unusual for France that is – self-service cafe, before the museum doors were locked behind us, and it was time to take the tram back to Place Bellecour.

The comprehensive and extensive system of trams and buses and underground trains operated by Metro de Lyon is another aspect of Lyon that makes the city so easy to explore. Although we walked most of our time there, we did take a tram and the underground a couple of times and found them comfortable and clean, and more importantly, on schedule. To get a better feel for the city as early as we could, on our first weekend we also made use of the hop-on/hop-off City Tour Bus. This really came into its own, for your scribe’s old knees at least, after a long, tiring, but fascinating walk around the amazingly ornate late nineteenth century La Basilique Notre Dame de Fourvière and the two beautifully preserved Roman theatres right next door.

The Fourvière hill was where the first Christian community was created in the country of Gaul. The hill’s dedication to the Virgin Mary supposedly saved the old city from the ravages of the Black Death in the fourteenth century, as well as the cholera epidemic in 1832 and the Prussian invasion in 1870; sceptics please remain silent! Certainly the marvellous view of the city from the top of the hill makes any pilgrimage to the Basilica very worthwhile.

One of three entertainment-oriented museums that we found really interesting was the Musée Lumière that we visited with our fellow students, as one of the cultural events arranged by Inflexyon, the language school we attended during our first couple of weeks in the city. Housed in the majestic Villa Lumière on the appropriately named rue du Premier-Film, in the Monplaisir district of the 8e arondissement, this fine collection pays homage to the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière, and describes their invention and development of the ‘moving picture’. The exhibits include several of the first movies ever made, on subjects as diverse as the children at family gatherings, steam trains passing through Lyon station, young men doing physical jerks and some classic slap-stick comedy routines. There was also a fine selection of their very early camera equipment as well as some insights into their early experiments at colour photography and videography. This was particularly interesting to two people whose home is not very far from Hollywood, an address that may never have achieved its fame without the innovative thinking of the Lumière brothers!

To better understand the history and development of Lyon, we visited the Musée Gadagne in the St Jean quarter of Vieux Lyon. Located in the Hôtel Gadagne, the early sixteenth century home of the brothers Gadagne, the building houses two museums, La Musée de l’Histoire de Lyon and the aforementioned Musée des Marionettes du Monde. This latter whimsical exhibition celebrates the birth of the famous glove puppet, Guignol, and his comedic friends, Gnafron and Madelon, the predecessors of the Punch and Judy shows that many of us remember from our childhood. Guignol was the invention of Lyon resident Laurent Mourguet, an out-of-work silk weaver, turned peddler and tooth puller, who started ‘puppeteering’ to distract his tooth-aching customers from the early 19^th century terrors of primitive dentistry. Less entertaining, but of much greater historical interest, the story of Lyon is long and fascinating, going back to Roman times, and the history museum does it more than justice. Housed in the original Hotel Gadagne built by the Florentine family Gadagni in the early sixteenth century and, with a lot of stairs to climb between four floors of exhibits, it requires a fair degree of stamina and determination to see and read everything; however, the visit is well worth the effort. And, as a final reward, there is a very pleasant little cafe in a roof top garden, which in days gone by was a small urban vineyard.

Completing the portfolio of entertainment-oriented museums in this fascinating city, there is the unusual collection of exhibits that comprise le Musée Miniature et Cinéma, deux passions, deux collections, created by the American miniaturist Dan Ohlman. Housed in the celebrated seventeenth century Maison des Advocats, close to the St Jean Cathedral, this eclectic mix of bizarre, and fairly gruesome, cinematic props,

along with a collection of very impressive miniature models of house and shop interiors, both real and imagined, some of which have been used in major Hollywood movies, makes for an hour of fascination to satisfy all ages and interests.

If none of these museums strike a chord, art lovers can choose from the Musée des Beaux Arts, the Musée d’Art Contemporain and the Musée des Tissus et Musée des Arts Decoratifs, students of ancient history have the Musée de la Civilisation Gallo-Romaine adjacent to the two Roman theatres on Fourvière hill, booklovers might enjoy the Musée de l’Imprimerie, and budding anthropolgists should take in the Musée Africain de Lyon. A veritable smorgasbord for those who love displays of “all-things museum-related”, after all, in one way or another, there is a “museumist” in all of us – thank you www.museumist.com for that delightful confabulated word!