August 2017
Before leaving for my France tour, I asked friends where to go in France. Nobody really knows much about France, but a friend from Argentina said it's cool in the south - in Lyon and Marseille. I knew about Lyon that a whole bunch of digital nomads go there - all kinds of Americans whose employers have no idea where they're working from (widespread working from home wasn't fashionable yet then). Decided, we're going there.
From Paris it's 400km, but takes less than two hours by train. France is a perfect country, though nobody knows about it.
The first thing a tourist sees
Hot in the city, lots of greenery
Wide and somehow "yellow"
Signs are blue
Purely Lyon thing - stones limiting parking
Sometimes with a tire, just like in Syktyvkar
Paid parking is indicated by a word. In conditional Prague - by colors (hence expressions like "blue zone")
Trash cans purely Lyon
Turns out the city has metro (in a couple hours I didn't see public transport at all)
Prostitutes are indicated simply by name, which is often a sign hinting that there are many migrants in the city. I even wrote separately about this
Lots of sun in the city, but thank God, greenery too
But not everywhere
Feel how it's scorching
Fountains don't save
Lyon is a hilly city, so there are tons of beautiful views
Here, one more
Traffic in Lyon is quite noisy
Lots of bridges in the very center
You can remember Lyon like this
Or like this
In the historic center everything's the same as in all historic centers of Europe
With one difference - notice the average age of a tourist
Architecture
Agree with this speaker
If you turn off main streets, full of such dead ends
Dead ends usually look creepy and dirty, and there's always a car in them
I wanted to gather courage, went into a cafe to eat. Sat at a table, waited 15 minutes, left. Apparently the ordering system works somehow in its own way.
Beautiful street sign
Pedestrian bridge
Slide for adults, slide with a cover on top so you don't burn your ass (whoever slid down a hot slide knows what I'm talking about)
French classic - completely invisible traffic lights
Another memorable photo for me - the woman in the photo, when she walked past me, looked at me with the camera like she was a model and I was photographing her. I didn't get this joke at all, why French women loved to stare at me like that
Quiet Lyon
Leaving, a person sees loud Lyon
Which looks like all other big cities in the world
Lyon proved to me once again that the south isn't for me. I'm a white northern person, and of all France I liked Lyon the least. Even short light dresses didn't help.
The cherry on top was that at the entrance to the shopping center they checked me because I was dressed "wrong." Well, dressed Czech basically, tourist-like with a backpack.