Lyon – Taran's Tales

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].

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!

Lyon – part three – Markets and Patisseries

Apart from our disappointments with the couple of bouchons we dined at, the food scene in Lyon was not by any means a disappointment overall. We were intending to live and eat like locals as far as possible throughout our journey, so we didn’t consider eating out very often. We decided to enjoy exploring the street markets when we got up early enough on market day, the traiteurs, the boulangeries and the patisseries, seeking out the various shops selling Bio products, and generally getting to know what was available and how satisfying the home-cooked food side of life would be in the places we were exploring. And Lyon was a good place to start this research.

We managed one Sunday morning visit to a wonderful street market, the Marché Sainte-Antoine Célestins on Quai des Célestins beside the Saône, and downriver from the Marché aux Bouquinistes, which is also a must for French-speaking bibliophiles (though don’t make my mistake and ask one of the vendors if you can look at a book that is near the bottom of a pile of books, unless you are a really serious potential buyer!). Our second day in Lyon, as we started to get our bearings walking south towards Lyon Confluence, we found ourselves on Place Bellecour, where we came upon the most wonderful traiteur, Maison Pignol, from whence we struggled back to our digs loaded with such delights as terrine canard rouge, two types of jambon, quiche, beet salad, ratatouille, plus goodness knows what else, all of which, once we had carried them back up the 150 steps to our roof-top eyrie, were every bit as tasty as they looked in the immaculate refrigerated display cases; and which continued to satisfy our taste buds for the best part of the following week!

Street markets are of course an integral part of every French community, but so are boulangeries and patisseries and again Lyon was no slouch in this latter regard, tempting us with delicious custard filled Royals, or millefeuilles, and my favourite tartes aux pommes, seemingly at every turn in the street, and ensuring the ever-ready availability of slightly warm, yeasty-smelling fresh bread, of many more types than just the quintessential baguette.

The street markets of Lyon are much more than simply food, household wares, bric-à-brac and old books, as we discovered a couple of times when visiting the square outside St Jean Cathedral. Our first surprise there one Sunday morning was the Tapinieres du Vieux Lyon, a fair celebrating the ceramic arts. Every imaginable kind
of ceramics were on sale, from fine jewellery to one twelfth size pottery tractors and steam boilers, by artists of both highly talented and decidedly crude skills, some of which we could have happily lived with but many we were glad to be living without! However, we did end up with beautiful crafted, matching, surrealist fish pendant and earrings as our memoire of the day. Another visit to the same location a couple of weeks later, revealed a thriving marché des antiquités et brocante, an ideal place to browse if looking to furnish and decorate a small apartment on a budget.

Lyon – part two – A fine park and a suspect mushroom!

Our first two weeks in Lyon passed by quickly and the time soon arrived for us to move to different accommodation and become full-time tourists. We had originally intended to stay the full month at Les Toits de Lyon but the threat of climbing 150 stairs up to our private eyrie twice a day or more for all that time, was more than your scribe’s knees liked to contemplate. So we had found another abode at 154 rue de Moncey in the newer Part-Dieu district of the 3e arrondissement. This 19th century bourgeois building is in the area of the city originally constructed in the epoch of grand architecture, in the style of Baron Haussman who designed much of elegant Paris we know today. Sadly many of those grand buildings have long since disappeared, allowing the construction of more modern buildings such as the magnificent 200m high Tour Incity overshadowing our second abode, the adjacent over-rated, Les Halles de Lyon Paul Bocuse, a more mundane Galeries Lafayette Lyon Part Dieu, and a selection of hotels such as Ibis, Mercure and Novotel, all of which, though useful to business and tourist traveller alike, detract from the innate attractiveness of the city of 100 years ago.

So we got to see a very different side of Lyon than the one we had so enthused about in the previous fortnight. The main redeeming feature of this new environment was that we found ourselves to be just a ten minute stroll from Le Parc de la Tête d’Or, 117 hectares of urban parkland, incorporating a large lake, a small but well stocked zoo for which there was no entry fee (one of the many advantages of living in a socially aware state), large greenhouses and botanical gardens, and large swathes of open grass and patches of woodland. Well frequented by locals of all ages and athletic capabilities, it was a lovely place to walk, jog or bike around and feel somewhat removed from the hustle and bustle of the city. As with large parks in other great cities, the park was surrounded by many elegant buildings housing embassies, consulates, upmarket consultants and the like, making it as pleasant a place to walk around, as to wander within.

Message to all students, “Go out and move the world!”

However, we still found ourselves continually drifting back to the old town, enjoying the atmosphere of the many outdoor cafes and the famous bouchons where in older and tougher times, the matrons of the town would serve hearty portions of simple, but tasty fare to their low-paid, artisan clientele. Those same tasty dishes still comprise the major portion of the goodies listed on today’s menu boards, but they aren’t all to everyone’s taste incorporating as they do all the tasty offal, tripe, fishy bits and fatty bits that modern western cuisine has come to avoid. Definitely food more suited to the ‘gourmand’ than the ‘gourmet’, but nonetheless appreciated by many as attested to by the full tables that we passed on our many peregrinations through the old streets.

Wise Mandarin saying: “This duck is not for eating!”

Beguiled by the tourist hype surrounding these famed Lyonnaise eating establishments, the main mass of which are to be found in Vieux Lyon along and around the old cobbled street rue Saint-Jean, we tried them a couple of times with varying degrees of satisfaction. Our first experience, to celebrate the end of the first week of our return to student life, was at Bouchon des Filles, a cosy little bistro, well off the main tourist trail, on rue du Sergent Blandan. We both love soufflé and, as well as the restaurant’s high rating on Trip Advisor, the mention of ‘Soufflé au Grand Marnier’ on the web-site menu grabbed our instant attention. Typically we found it was off the menu the Sunday evening of our visit, and we contented ourselves with entrées of terrine de joues de porc and main courses of roignons de veau avec du riz – not so well appreciated – and une quenelle de brochet avec sauce de crevettes, very typical Lyonnaise and quite delicious. Your cheese-loving raconteur also enjoyed his introduction to Brillat-Savarin, a soft, white cow’s milk cheese, somewhat like Camembert, and also from Normandy. A reasonable introduction to the much-lauded eating scene of Lyons but not really enough to make us want to pursue it too often at the expense of our intended ‘cooking-at-home-like-the-locals’ regime. However, as we had Celine’s friend Danusia staying with us towards the end of our stay, we decided to give it one more try. One day, after a visit to the fascinating Musée des Marionettes in Saint-Jean, the oldest part of the city on the west bank of the Saône, we happened to pass a very nice looking bouchon on rue Mercière called eponymously Le Mercière which, coincidentally, had its interior decorated with models of Guignol, the marionette that we had just learnt made Lyon’s puppetry famous. So without further ado, and omitting our usual cautious ‘let’s read the reviews first’ approach, we decided to eat there and then, found a table outside where we could enjoy the passing crowd, and, while sitting next to a chatty group of local businessmen, had another unremarkable meal including quenelles de coquilles, tablier de sapeur lyonnais (a load of tripe!), volaille de challans and some desserts. What we hadn’t bargained for was the interesting cèpe, part of the sauce served with the hard plank of tripe, that found its way into this writer’s stomach and provided an unforgettable psychedelic trip during the ensuing night, a very weird, unexpected experience indeed!