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Published: November 11th 2019
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St. Exupery memorial
Author with the figure of Le Petit Prince looking over his shoulder Remembrance Day, 2019
Lyon, France
Sorry about the absence of entry yesterday, those of you who were waiting anxiously for the latest gems to trip off my keyboard. I have been fighting a cold/cough for, geez, most of this vacation. Most days it has gone pretty well, but yesterday was, hm, shall we say, what’s the right word? Crap. Yes, that’s it, crap.
Today is much better and, since I have had COFFEE!!!, the world is a significantly cheerier place. So, while Susan is going though her preparations for the day, I have time to write to you. Come to think of it, this is the first time I have been able to work to my customary schedule, blogging in the morning, on this entire trip! (Some mornings, I have had a double espresso and then fallen asleep. NOT normal.)
Highlights of Saturday’s tour: the “Little Prince” statue, a tribute to Antoine St. Exupery. Having Ann take us to the best cheese maker selling in the local market. There we bought a huge chunk of the man’s Cantal cheese – dinner last night. She also recommended a particular local Jura wine to go with it: Sauvignin (yes,
Inside the Long Traboule
It passes through four private properties but anyone can use it during the day that’s the right spelling). Only one place in town has it, it is just up the street from us and they have a resident dog. So, of course we got a bottle. The last bottle they had, in fact, at 38 euros.
The reason for the expense? The wine has been deliberately “oxidated” – allowed to be in contact with air, rather like sherry but without the added white alcohol sherry gets to stabilize it. When that happens by accident, the wine acquires a sweetish, “off”, taste, turns slightly brown, and smells like sherry or madeira. In fact, it is said to have “madeira-ised”, and will get an ordinary table wine poured down the drain. Followed by a lot of cold water, because it smells bad. Done under properly controlled conditions, underneath a carefully monitored “blanket” of yeast, for 32 MONTHS, like our wine, it creates expensive stuff.
Which still reminds me of wine which has gone off. Susan said it was good with the cheese and fantastic with chocolate. But it wasn’t really like, well, hm . . . wine? (She had two other expensive “wines” which reminded me of this one at the one Michelin star
La Tour Rose in Vieux Lyon
A landmark, an architectural feature, and one of the spots where an underground tunnel can be found. This one, the story goes, was used by an immensely powerful crime lord whose tentacles reached throughout France. joint. One was also oxidated but spent seven years in contact with oak: a 2014 Burgundy. The other is quite rare, and was made as wines first were milennia ago. Susan couldn’t drink it. Said it tasted like beer. Sure smelled like it. Our poor little sommelier, a nice young man, was kind of stunned but rallied himself with the thought – which he was much too pleasant to do more than hint at – that only a sufficiently sophisticated palate could truly appreciate such a beverage. I did NOT suggest to him that perhaps there was a reason that people stopped making wine like that 2,000 years ago.)
Since then: stumbled on a great little restaurant on a side street yesterday. Going out for lunch and Kleenex was our expedition yesterday. Best food we have had yet. We are going back tonight in the hopes the place is open. I had the steak and it was brilliant. Perfectly cooked, served with mashed potatoes, perfectly cooked assorted veggies, butternut squash purée. Susan had two appetizers (the French word for "appetizer" by the way is the slightly misleading "entree". Which leads to all kinds of English-speakers going away hungry and
Celebrating the Croix Rousse in the sun
Where many other underground features have been discovered confused): little raviolis in a delicious truffle cream sauce and lovely foie gras.
Speaking of confused, I am afraid that is what we did to our poor tour guide yesterday Such a lovely woman and SO gracious about donating hours of her time AND taking responsibility for making sure we had a second chance to go with her after I had to cancel the first time. I think she was expecting tourists. She came with a map of Lyon with the highlights marked in yellow. I came with a bigger map with the highlights marked in pink. And mostly checked off. We had been here for more than a week at that time, after all. She offered to show us how to use the public transit system. We asked to walk instead. She showed us the famous "traboules", the ancient covered, occasionally, public passages which run through privately owned buildings in Vieux Lyon. The guidebooks say they were there to allow the workers in Lyon's silk industry - huge here in the 19th century - to carry their goods out of the rain. But the traboules are ancient and in a different part of town from where the silk
works were. Ann's explanation was much more logical and satisfying: they were an urban planning compromise.
Back then the lower part of Lyon only had three streets. They ran north and south, trapped between the river Saone and were the Fourviere hill get steep enough to make walking a strain and building roads a pain. Real estate was too expensive for the Italian merchant bankers who built much of the lower town to be willing to give up bits of their property to let cross streets be built. They would have seen people walk for hundreds of yards to make any progress east or west. Rather cleverly, somebody came up with the idea for the passageways, privately owned and maintained, but available for public use, at least during the day. The bankers could build over them but not close them off.
The traboules are not the only secret or semi-secret passages in Lyon. We have a little book in our apartment, volume 1!, that lists 41 known subterranean passages and galleries in Lyon. Many appear to be Roman in origin. They range in length from more than 50 metres to over 500 metres and include not just passages
A second view of our fireplace
Because I like it very much, that's why! but also "aretes" or "galleries". Similar tunnels in northern France were used to store fodder and grain and also built by the Romans. (Many of them were rediscovered by tunnellers during the First World War who were saved a lot of digging thus.) Here, they are usually dug back into the slopes of either the Fourviere hill, or across the river into the Croix Rousse district. More modern times have seen them used by smugglers - now there's a surprise - and by the Resistance in WWII.
Now it's time to get ready for dinner! More tomorrow!
Attached to this are some pictures of the inside of our apartment, as requested by by Mom. And tomorrow everything will be up and running again. In spite of today being a holiday, even the municipal workers were building roads and picking up garbage today, and most stores were open.
Tomorrow is also the day we meet up with Franck Savoye, a local artist who is engaged to a woman in St. Paul (yes, OUR St. Paul, in ALBERTA) who is a close friend of my friend and hairdresser, Monique Allard. We are buying him lunch on the condition that he takes us his favorite restaurant and lets us see some of his work.
Soon!
Tim
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