Lyon has a lot of cultural activities going on throughout the year and during our stay in September, it was the turn of the 17e 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”.