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Place Bellecour, in the centre of Lyon - looking up towards 'Old Lyon' and Basilica of Notre Dame de Fourviere on the hillside. It was POURING After our stint is Paris we headed straight for Lyon, a smaller city of about 400 000 (I'm not checking any of my facts, so they're probably wrong). The train to Lyon only takes 2 hours, and train travel is something I've grown very fond of. The TGVs (train de grand vitesse, which pretty much means very fast train (that's a lazy name)) go at about 3-400kmph, so that's a fair distance. Lyon was a nice change from Paris, much more quiet, and a little less touristy. The town is trisected by two rivers, which then meet forming a kind of wishbone in the city. The buildings have the same flat, white, windowed facades that we liked in Paris and London, as well as terracotta tiled roofs. We only had one full day in Lyon, so we took a quick cable car up to the old town, where we visited a church on top of a church as well as a church under a church (these were the same churches). The old-town is on a hillside and provided great views of the city, which you can see in our photos.
Lyon is also apparently the gourmet capital of France, so,
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Basilica of Notre Dame de Fourviere and Drew. The Basilica contains 2 churches - one of top of the other - it's officially an 'upper and lower sanctuary' but I will call it 'top and bottom church' - way more classy finding ourselveas in a town plump with the culmination of a thousands years gourmet culture, we had McDonalds for the first time in France. I'll give it to them, my Boss burger did have some kind of mustard, so there was a bit of flair.
We were only accosted by one hobo in Lyon, a little boy at the Metro station. He grabbed my arm as I was using the ticket machine, kissed it repeatedly and called me Jesus. I was taken aback by his divine compliment and was hoping that I could perform miracles with our ticket change, reach into the machine and find some bread and fish. It wasn't to be, and he could only frown at the 10c I gave him. Cheeky little shit should've been happy though, better than a baguette and some cod.
We'd had enough of cities, so we headed to the coast. As Jo must have written in her last blog (I admit, I didn't read it), we couldn't head to Nice because it was busy. Turns out the Cannes film festival is on. So we settled on Toulon instead. Toulon is between Marseilles and Nice on the Cote d'Azure
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Basilica of Notre Dame de Fourviere , without Drew (SE France, Med coast). It's famous for its big money rugby team; I didn't see Tana, SBW or Johnny Wilkinson, but I did hear some people in a shop talking about them (wohoo). We stayed in Toulon for 3 nights, so had two full days so take on the sun. Toulon has a pretty large naval base, so there were plenty of titty bars and sex shops. This combined with loose inhibitions and bikini strings at beaches led to a lot of 'why didn't I wear my contact lenses' moments, and a lot of 'is she topless?' questioning by me to eagle-eye Carrick ('that's a guy' was the most common response). The beach that we visited was lovely, but the water was bloody cold and we could only manage a brief plunge. We assumed that our skin was so used to New Zealand's ruthless sun branding our skin that we wouldn't need sunblock, but we came away from our first beach day rather raw.
During the first day at the beach I was seeing how far in to the sand I could push a stick, or covering my foot with shells, or something inane, when I looked up to
see that Jo was gone. A quick scan of the beach and I saw her sprinting seaward, all Pam Anderson like, pluck a face-down baby from the water (and certain doom), hand it to its mother (who was negligently not watching her kids and a good 20 metres away from them up the beach) and stroll casually back to our spot. When asked later if she thought she was a hero, Jo replied “No, anyone would've done the same”. Brave AND modest, what an example for us all.
I felt Jo has set a new standard for our trip in terms of altruism, so the next day in a busy market I was searching for danger when I tripped over a pole and fell on my face. Lucky Jo was there and helped me out.
So having both left our mark on Toulon it was time to move on. We had planned a whole day's train trek to Barcelona, but our train from Marseille was cancelled due to a crash and we missed our connection. So we spent last night in Montpellier, which was ok. There wasn't really a lot to do, but we watched people get splashed
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Windows in the top church of Basilica of Notre Dame de Fourviere by a fountain and I got called a racist. When we went to catch the train we're on now, it had also been delayed due to another crash, but only by 40 or so minutes. This has left me with some doubt as to the safety of the rail network, so maybe I was a little hasty in singing the praises of train travel. If I post this blog I survived, if not, I want Boyz II Men to sing 'Amazing Grace' and 'Heya!' at my funeral.
Barcelona next, which Jo will probably write about.
I read a good joke: A man walked in to a doctor's office wearing gladwrap underwear. The Doctor said “Well, I can clearly see you're nuts.”
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Alecsandro Anderson
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Train a Grand Vitesse, not Train de Grand Vitesse