Part 17: Broken bicycles and irrepressible happiness in Lyon

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Song- There must be an angel

Continued…
Another excruciatingly long ride through snow later, and I had convinced myself that I was actually crazy. The snow was sticking and it was well below freezing when I got to Lyon. I won’t bore you with the dangerous details again; there is too much to say about Lyon. I had smartly made arrangements to stop about halfway to Lyon, if the weather was bad enough. I decided the conditions were passable, and they were.
These cold rides are affecting my face. I feel like I am aging, and I don’t like it much. I am lucky though, my colleague is pioneering a cutting edge anti-aging treatment; all I have to do is volunteer!
Lyon is my favorite French city, thanks to three amazing hosts and my old friend Jessica who I had the pleasure of visiting while I was there.
My time there was filled with warmth and generosity, images of snow covered mountains and streets, music, kissing couples and smiling friends. In Lyon I felt inspired, accepted, appreciated and loved.
I arrived at the home of Claude, my first host, around nightfall, and was very, very cold. His family warmed me up with good cheer and some espresso - as well as fire from logs he gathers from his own forest at his parents’ Burgundy estate. Claude is an interesting man who does marketing for an international company. He rents email addresses to send promotional emails to thousands of people; he also sings in a jazz band for fun. In the band, he translates the words of popular English-language songs into French and sings them.
His family is very interesting. His beautiful daughters are active in school, play instruments, and are members of a special swim team. That first night, I asked if I could go with the family to their swimming practice, and they tried their best to bring me along. Together we walked to the bus stop, but the daughters’ horrible old witch/swimming instructor refused to allow me to come along. I wouldn’t have known she was so truly horrible if Claude and his wife hadn’t confirmed it. The instructor said it would be a liability issue, and in fact she wouldn’t even look at me. I refused to leave until she looked at me, allowing me the opportunity to guilt her with my politeness. “Pardon Madame, Pardon. J’ai beaucoup desole.”
On the following day, Claude took me to around the town a bit. First he showed me the Roman aqueducts near his home that led into the city. They date back to the time of Antiquity, meaning they are close to 2,000 years old. They stretch all the way to St. Etienne, about 100 kilometers away. Claude and I climbed the aqueduct, and snapped some photos. At the top I saw something very familiar - a pile of Heineken bottles. Heineken, the best-selling beer in Hawaii, was left in a disgraceful mess here in Lyon. It occurred to me that the historical remnants of Hawaiian culture that had inspired me to take this trip were only 1,000 years old at most - and that I was standing on a structure in one of my ancestral homelands (Lyon) that was approximately 2,000 years old. I had already achieved something on my trip; I had found a piece of my own native culture that reached back to another plane of existence.
Next Claude drove me into the city of Lyon, where we visited another unlikely beer-related tie-in to my life: Ninkasi Brewery. Yes, just like Eugene Oregon, Lyon has a brewery named after the God of fermentation. I took some photos to be appreciated by the folks back in Oregon who may recognize this.
When we arrived, at 2:30pm, the kitchen had already shut down. We ordered off the bar menu, and paid about double what we expected. The beer was acceptable, nothing special. I ordered a bierre noire to take back for dinner that evening. It was the only dark beer I saw anywhere in France. France and Italy are very much wine countries, with few breweries, and even fewer GOOD breweries. If you want a dark beer in France, the best you can get is something brown, which they call “Brune”. They like floral beers, like Belgians and triples. On the beer I took home, there is a graphic on the label (in the picture gallery with this story post) discouraging pregnant women from drinking. It is probably a good idea, considering if you are dumb enough to drink while pregnant in the first place, you are probably too stupid to read as well.
I must comment on the music played over the sound system while we were eating at Ninkasi. How about this for a playlist: 1) Brand New Bag - James Brown 2) Hey Joe - Jimi 3) Bullet in the head - Rage Against the Machine 4) Stand by Me - Ben E. King 5) Digging Grave - Faith No More 6) Bullet in the Head (again). I don’t think I have ever heard a more course transition than “Fuck that, don’t do what they told ya” to “When the night, is young…and the land is dark”. Go listen to those two consecutively right now and tell me what YOU think.
Inside Ninkasi’s bathroom, I noted a poster for a local band that would be performing in the coming days. They looked like scholarly gentlemen, except they decided to name their band the “Go*damn Motherfu#&ers”. Now I understand what it sounds like to native speakers when, as children, we randomly apply foreign obscenities without comprehension.
Claude took me to a museum in the center of town dedicated to the work of the Lumiere brothers, the inventors of the world’s first moving pictures. The part of the museum we explored told us about the lives of the men and displayed some of the equipment they used.
My two favorite still photos in the museum were one with a man punching a leaping dog in the face (extreme), and another of a man performing a karate kick in mid air. I tried to get them on a postcard, but they wanted about three times what it was worth.
What interested me the most was the work of, Gabrielle Feyre, one of the early cinematographers who traveled almost the whole world back at the turn of the 19th century. One wall showed how he altered his appearance in each place, making an attempt to “blend in” as much as a French intellectual can in China, Morocco or Mexico.
While we were at the museum, a young lady asked Claude if he spoke any English. She was an English college student who had a survey about French cinema for him to fill out. He tried to read the questions, but they were phrased so poorly that he couldn’t even understand what she was getting at. A very helpful person by nature, Claude attempted to help her correct the wording (which was likely just ported lazily off Babelfish without a copy-edit), but she didn’t seem to care at all. I tried to corner her and confirm that she had actually come to spend a semester in Lyon studying film, and didn’t care whether the results she got from her survey were useful for anything. Indeed, she was homesick for Liverpool, and all she cared about was her flight home for the holidays being delayed by snow.
Lyon has the biggest music store I have ever seen. You may have noticed that almost every chain of music stores has gone out of business in America (expect maybe Sam Goody, which I made an unbroken pact never to visit again 15 years ago). You can imagine my surprise when I entered this Incredible Universe-size music and book store and saw something like the population of Port-Au-Prince’s largest refugee camp inside - BUYING things. What blew my mind even further was noticing that the price tags on music were astronomical. Seriously, the cheapest disc in that place would equate to about $18.00. Most CDs would be about $30 or more. Straight up bonkers.
This prompted me to share with Claude the gospel of www.mp3panda.com, where you can download music for $.05/song. Yep. That’s right. $.05 per song. As I was telling him, a man next to us happened to overhear, and demanded that I repeat for him the address. He was holding a stack of about 15 CDs he was about to buy - well over $200.
Now, to all my musician friends out there: I honestly only download music from dead artists, so I don’t steal from the living. HELLLLO Jacko!!
I had a dream this night where I was a child at a family reunion. Everyone was dressed in 1970’s/80’s softball gear, and overly excited about playing softball. Someone in the dream asked me if I thought their extreme athletic enthusiasm was healthy. It reminded me, for the first time, that throughout my childhood all I wanted to do at any given time was play/practice baseball. Really, to an abnormal extent. I was completely obsessed, but I loved it.
It was around this age that one day in school the teacher went around the room and asked all the children what they parents did for a living. I said great things about my mother, and then reported that my dad was a “bum.” My teacher was horrified, and I couldn’t understand why. I thought a “bum” was some sort of professional title for someone who doesn’t “go to work” at a job every day - dad worked in the home. The word “bum” just raises the image of a ragged, unshaven creep, lying on a bench with a paper bag full of tawny port.
Claude, and every other French person I have met 1) totally LOVES Obama, and 2) thinks his election means Americans are coming around and will correct their course shortly. I feel like a real bastard to have to tell them that it feels more hopeless than ever to me - seeing how even someone as brilliant as Obama can’t make congress budge to actually solve what is obviously the biggest problem in our country, health care.
Claude was leaving with his family for the holidays, giving me an opportunity to meet new host friends in Lyons. Because A) the snow was terrible, 2) I hate driving in big cities if I don’t have to, and D) because Lyon has a great transportation system, I decided to leave my bike at Claude’s home and take the bus with my daypack to my next host’s home near the heart of the city.
The plan worked like clockwork, and pretty soon I was introducing myself to my new best friend, Gilles. Gilles is a very sharp young guy in his 30’s, sharing many interests with me. He taught me some family recipes, and showed me the view from the balcony of his penthouse flat. He’s rightly proud of his view, and it’s one of the reasons he chose to live in Lyon - because real people can’t afford this kind of view in Paris.
Gilles works for federal government, studying population habitation patterns, and providing the information planners need to make informed decisions. It’s one of those jobs where you can only make your obvious statements in between the lines. Your job is just to give people the information they request.
Watching the snow from Gilles’ balcony, he said it was one of only a couple of times he had seen it come down in Lyon and stick. Luckily, I didn’t have to go anywhere for a couple of days.
While I showered earlier at Claude’s home, I looked outside at the puffs of white that rained down on the city. I opened the tiny window and watched a wall of hot steam explode directly into an army of frost and smiled. I thought to myself, “There is something right in the world when you are showering outside.”
We went to a local market and picked up specialty foods from the region. When I told him the one notorious French delicacy I had yet to try, my fate was sealed. I was eating snails tonight. When I did, I ate almost a dozen. Cooked in garlic and butter, how can you go wrong? They had the texture of a mushroom, with some extra protein!
Gilles refused to let me pay for anything. The generosity of nearly every host has astounded me. I never could have imagined before this trip that the entire world is full of such kind, generous and cheerful people.
As we walked along, a Romanian woman asked Gilles for money. Throughout France, I have been approached by many people asking for money. Many of them have told me they were Romanian, and that they needed money because their father was dying in a hospital somewhere, etc... I noted that throughout history many very poor Roma/Gypsies have come from Romania to Western Europe. However, up until very recent times, they had always performed psychic readings, fortune telling, or some other hocus pocus to give you the impression that they had “earned” the money you gave them. Today many of them just put their hand out and lie to you directly.
Here’s a note about beggars in France. Gilles tells me that in France there is actually a “freezing bum” hotline. Yes, at any time you can call #115 and report someone who looks cold or sickly in the street - and someone will come and pick them up, feed them and give them a place to sleep. Amazing! A country that actually cares about the welfare of its people!
Gilles also told me that every pack of cigarettes in France has a huge label on the front that simply says, “Smoking kills.” Each one has a picture of something horrible on the front of it, however one of them is far worse: the one with a set of disgusting yellow teeth. He says even the smokers can’t handle it. They will say, “cigarettes please… give me the skull or the black lungs… but not the teeth! Anything but the teeth.”
We took a walk through all parts of Lyon old and new, with Gilles revealing secret passages and pointing out unknown monuments. We shared a bottle of some of the best French wine I have had, as we cooked an unforgettable meal of his grandmother’s recipe for Osso Bucco.
I kept expecting his phone to ring with a harem of women trying to court him, but I believe the only one he spoke to was his mother. Ladies, if you’d like Gilles phone number, just send me a picture to pass along, and I’ll put him in touch with you.
The next day was my favorite of the trip so far.
I awoke after a firm ten hours of slumber to a classic winter wonderland. I skipped along the river, while my new favorite song filled any vacancy in the scene and my heart - “There must be an angel,” by Annie Lennox. I have linked the song in the videos section of this entry; my interpretation is the emotion of feeling in love with everything in life, without dependence on any person in particular. That’s exactly how I felt in Lyon, at exactly that magic moment in time.
As if to confirm this emotion, I watched the couples all around me smile and embrace. Walking past me on the bridge, one couple lip-locked for a good 30 seconds. Later a Muslim couple (woman in burka) had a minor snowball fight, laughing and holding each other. I smiled when I saw the man tenderly brush all the snow off his girlfriend’s shoulders and hold her hand.
It was a French city, so of course I got lost. I enjoyed getting lost though, and was able to take a few dramatic pictures from the top of the city.
Later, near the famous horse fountain (today frozen in an icy and horrifying expression) in the plaza at the Hotel De Ville, I reconnected with my high school friend Jessica O’Hara. Jessica is studying in France for the year, and it had been five years since we last saw each other, and she is a very different person. We recalled the bad feeling at our last parting, ending with me leaving a knife on her doorstep in a harmless and yet threatening manner. You see, we used to be roommates… it was her knife…
Anywhoo… we are all good now. In fact we are great now. We caught each other up on our lives, and spent the rest of the night together and with her friends Erin and Lisa. All three of them have been living in the American Northwest (Seattle/B.C.), and were very happy to welcome another American to hang out with.
After a little guitar hero and some alcohol we stole from Lisa’s French roommates, we did the most American thing we could think of - we got Domino’s, Coke and Ben & Jerry’s. Couldn’t find any Budweiser…
Getting the pizza was pretty funny. The girl at the register immediately spoke to us in English. We asked how she spoke such good English and she said it was because she was Egyptian. We all looked at each other, and then somebody laughed, then the girl laughed, and then we laughed like we were all high or something for what seemed like 3 or 4 minutes. I’m still not sure what happened there.
Later, we went to a bar and helped Erin fill out 25 extremely late Christmas postcards for her family. We communally agreed on a message and then set about dividing up the cards to write. For those who received the cards I was responsible for, they were done in my best and most convincing “man-dwriting.”
By the time we were all tired and our little party dissipated, it was too late for me to drop in on Gilles, so Jessica let me crash at her tiny flat for what was left of the night.
The next morning I picked up my things from Gilles and moved on to pick up my scooter back at Claude’s home.
I took the tram to the station, and then since there was limited bus service on Sundays, I took the closest bus that was still running toward his home. The bus let me out just a couple of kilometers away from their home - a couple of kilometers BELOW their home. In the darkness and remnants of snow, I hiked up a dark and windy road for about an hour until I arrived in their friendly village of Chapanost. When I got there, I knew there was a slight chance that in these very cold temperatures I may have trouble starting the bike. Indeed. I tried until I nearly killed my starter: no dice.
I had to call my final Lyon host, Claire, and humbly ask her if she could come and pick me up. She graciously agreed to come and save my butt.
She welcomed me into her cozy home, and we cooked another delicious meal together. She made the best salad dressing I can remember eating, and I made her give me the recipe.
Here it is folks:
Balsamic vinegar and old wine or cider, olive oil and nut oil (pumpkin seed), mustard, sesame seeds (cooked, broken and salted), sesame paste/puree and yeast. I swear, it’s amazing.
My room had no passable light coming through the window, so when she came home for lunch at noon to help me try my Vespa again, I was still asleep.
We took a small truck with a bed large enough to fit the bike into, and went to try to start it again. Again, it refused. We put the scooter inside the truck and drove to Lyon, where we would take it to the dealership. We got to the dealership, unloaded the bike, and saw that the dealership was closed for the holidays. Completely out of options, I said a prayer, and turned the key one last time. Purchase. The only practical explanation is that the 25 minutes the bike spent in the back of the truck warmed the engine block enough to start it easily. Believe what you want to believe.
I stayed that last night with Claire, making firm plans to leave at 8a.m. the next morning for my longest ride yet - about 200 miles to Marseille, avoiding the toll highway. At the time, I believed this would be my last COLD ride. I thought as soon as I got to the Mediterranean, I would have warm weather for the rest of winter. Hahaha! Oh, I was so wrong, but thinking that motivated me to keep going.
In preparation for the next day’s trip, I went to get fuel from the station nearest to my host’s home. I found the station easy, filled up, and picked up an inexpensive bottle of wine. Now, the directions were very, very easy. Leave the house, turn left, and keep going, the station is on your right. Returning home was more difficult. I drove past the house without realizing it, and spent the next half hour retracing the next three miles of road over and over again. I did my Incredible Hulk routine, and was so angry WITH MYSELF and completely and horribly embarrassed to have put myself in a situation of personal responsibility for navigating across a foreign continent - and unable to follow even the simplest direction imaginable. Of course I found it in the end, but the embarrassment would last for some time.
You have noticed, certainly, that my blog entries usually end on some juvenile Goosebumps-esque attempted cliffhanger. I won’t do that for Lyon, it’s too good for it.
I love Lyon. Go and visit.
Xoxoxoxo Brennan

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Photos

TheAmericans
Lisa, Jessica, Erin and Brennan

pregdrink
For those pregnant persons who aren't smart enough to read.

Vine-Aq
Vineyards beside a 2,000 year old aqueduct

Basilica-night
The Basilica at night

Basilica-day
The mighty basilica, perched above Lyon

b-aq-lyon
Brennan, above Lyon

cock memorial
I believe there is a poem by Jim Morrison: Lament for my cock. That actually sounds like the next band to make it big: "Morrison Death Cock"

Claire
One of my fine Lyon hosts, Claire

escargot
Yummy

Lyon-Night
Lyon at Night

Comments

[Zoe]

Sorry but :D :D :D
Irrepresible urge: Would you please explain the system of categorization used here... "Because A) the snow was terrible, 2) I hate driving in big cities if I don’t have to, and D) because Lyon has a great transportation system" ROFL My first real smiles of the day are all thanks to your blog :D (it's 15.08 right now)

[Dolemitesprint]

Home alone
I refer my comments on this categorization technique to the 1990 film staring Macaulay Caulkin.