Blogs from Lyon, Rhône-Alpes, France, Europe - page 20

Dear friends and family, It has been exactly a week since my last posting, and I wish I posted more, but I have limited access to internet. It's either the teacher's lounge at school during the day, or WIFI somewhere downtown, usually McDonalds, which plays hot music and is kind of upscale, and of course has good coffee and patisseries in addition to the ''Royal with Cheese'', which is their quarter-pounder with cheese. I think Pulp Fiction mentions this profound fact. Anyway, classes have been going pretty well. I have been doing maybe only 6 or 7 hours a week, and this past week and this week are both "observation weeks" where I mostly sit in the front row to observe how the teacher conducts class, from vocabulary lessons to personal style of pronunciation to personal ... read more

So it has been a while since my last blog entry (yes, I survived Oktoberfest). After taking a day off of Oktoberfest on Monday, I wanted to get back at it on Tuesday. Before heading down at about 10, I checked my email to see if I had heard from my billet in Lyon. There was a message asking what time my train got in. After seaching for about 2 hours, I had a connection that only went through France & Germany (where my pass is valid) and arrived at a decent time of day (I couldn't find a hostel online). Then I had to go to the train station to make reservations. All told it was about 4 by the time I got down to the Weisen. After searching in vain for a seat I ... read more

So that we didn't have to catch the shuttle bus back to the Avignon TGV station, we decided to get a non TGV train to Lyon which left from the central Avignon station which was only a short walk away. Once you included the time for the shuttle bus, we estimated that the non TGV train would actually be faster for us. We arrived in Lyon at the Part Dieu station which is in the business district and we checked into our Ibis Hotel which was only a short walk away. We then found the nearest subway station (our first subway for sometime) and bought some daily tickets and headed into the main town centre. Lyon have 4 subway lines, one of which (Line D) has driverless trains where you can look through the front of ... read more

(Okay, just pretend that the Rugby World Cup is not over yet!). We arrived in Lyon from Geneva after an easy trip on the train and found our way to the correct tram after only one circuit of the Station.The tram then spat us out about 100m from our hotel which was most helpful, as indeed was everything else French. We'd heard truly awful things about the French people- their rudeness, arrogance and so on- all of which turned out to be completely unfounded. No-one could have been nicer or more helpful. Lyon, the city hosting the first Australian pool match against Japan, was where we were to meet up with the other half of the touring party; Gay and Joe. Luckily they turned up, and luckier still they were able to recognise me, even ... read more

I woke up around 7am to a very silent apartment. I stayed in bed until I heard Emma awake around 8 am. We dressed quietly and went out to the patisserie and got more chocolate chip bread sticks for breakfast. When we returned Abigail was awake, but Eliza remained asleep until 9:30!! Jonathan woke up and tried to sort out his appointment at the University of Lyon, the whole purpose of our trip and yet they hadn’t been in contact with him in weeks. It turns out that their email was down so he made arrangements via the cell phone to meet up with a colleague at 11am. The girls and I didn’t leave the apartment until almost 11 and they voted to go back to the castle playground at Bellacour. We played there for ... read more