I'm losing my body weight in sweat.

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We are now in Lyon, which is a fabulous city with the exception of the fact that it is so hot here I feel that I may die of heat stroke any moment. It is I think about +35 degrees here but also it is a lot more humid so that when you step into a particularily hot spot it feels like your lungs may collapse, whew. Our trip from Paris went well, we had a delicious lunch (I had some meat that I hope was beef...) and of course some more dessert and then said a nice farewell to our wonderfully nice landlord-guy and went to the train station. Turns out we havce to buy reservations (6€) for TGVs so we ended up having to wait awhile. Right now I'm reading Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott because in Scotland there were a bajillion statues and other such commemorative things all over for Scott so I wanted to see what was so great and so far it is very good, but anyhow back to the story I read a lot of it waiting for the train.
 
The train was very cool and fast, despite the fact that there is a bit of a gap in translation here and I accidentally reserved a smoking car with no ventilation. However, there was a kitty, so I felt a bit better. AND our seats were facing backwards and I hate that. The TGVs (trains de grande vitesse, or basically high-speed trains) are amazing though, they rip across the countryside at like 250 km/hr or some insane speed like that, but they are so quiet and not at all bumpy. Wheeee!
 
We got to Lyon at about 5 or so and set out to find the hostel which is situated on a very steep hill, so we took a neat contraption called a funiculaire (cable car) up. The hostel is okay, but there is room for about 130 people and only one clothes washer and one dryer, so that posed a problem. We were up until about 11:45 playing crib (I still haven't won a game) because the people who were doing their laundry before us were slacking off and kept forgetting about it, until I was forced to haul all their clothes out of the machine myself. Sarah went in there later and said that they looked confused as to how their clothes ended up in a bag on top of the dryer. Er... the laundry fairy did it.
 
Sleep was a chore because despite the fact that we were exhausted the room was so hot we had to leave the window open and people were ripping past the hostel on the loudest motorbikes I have ever heard. And then at about 6:00 in the morning this goddamn rooster starts crowing, and I was much inclined to leap out of my bed and shoot it.
 
Today we had some breakfast, and dessert, and lunch, and dessert, and are looking forward to supper... with dessert. We also hung out all day in this gigantic park called le Parc de Tete D'Or, so called because there is a legend that there is a golden head of Jesus buried somewhere in it. We didn't look for it, though. Anyhow, it is a huge public park and there was some botanical gardens and greenhouses and a free zoo where we saw some strange birds and a leopard and 3 elephants (Andrew, Gladys and Martha, we call them) and monkeys and big turtles and deer and some giraffes. It was quite neat. We had lunch there too where we had some tomato salad and fries. The thing about salads here is that if you ask for a "tomato salad" you get basically a tomato cut up on a plate, weird. I tried some Dijon dressing and it was very nice. And of course, ice cream for dessert.
 
Tomorrow we are planning to get up bright and early and hop a train to the South of France for some sunny beaches and palm trees, and maybe I can get a tan on these pearly white legs of mine.
 
Cheers!
Jackie

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