Vieux Lyon

France is still amazing. I could stay here forever. I love it even more than I did when I wrote my original post. Anna is cool because she's pretty laid back at night time, so we just get some awesome food and go right back to our hotel room for "movie night" (aka movie-for-her night. I tend to lay back and do random crap so as not to fall asleep..)

We pass by a couple of the same streets every day but there's always some new thing that turns up that we'd never spotted before. Then there's certain places which we have to stop by every time we pass… the good old Patisserie de Pasion or something like that, just along the entrance to Vieux Lyon. Everything looks so delectable and cute, I vow to eat everything in it! Quiches, pizzas, little pastries with the usual and slightly more interesting flavours. I had a pistachio and apricot tart today just to add some extra fun. It's nice eating outside the cafe for breakfast, but Anna hates that we're always accompanied by suspicious little sparrows… We also treated ourselves to Bouchon Lyonnais last night for a traditional three-course French dinner. I had an entree of Salade Lyonnais (pretty much a Caesar salad), some pork sausages for main, and panna cotta for dessert.

We've been exploring a lot of the city. The newer part of Lyon is really great for its shopping districts and designer boutiques. But what I'm really loving is old city, Vieux Lyon. To reach it, you cross the Saone River through Pont Bonaparte and it's really just the whole region below that hilltop Fouviere Basilica. Yesterday we ditched the furnicular/cable car, and instead climbed up the hilltop to reach Fouviere! It was a great little hike - foresty, and there were delicate orchards and rose gardens dedicated to Our Lady.

The most exciting thing about Vieux Lyon in my opinion, is not only for its dainty shops and the cute restaurants, but because of these things called "traboules". Traboules are secret passageways along the city, that were used by the resistance during World War II to hinder German occupation. How cool is that. They were originally built for silk traders in the fourth century to facilitate their transport of textile merchandise along the river and to the rest of the city, but these days some of them are blocked off because they're actually on private property -entrances to private apartments and such. I sort of of think of them as awesome mazes from Alice in Wonderland. A lot of the doors are identical: two adjacent doors could be next to each other and one leads to some awesome winding open-air courtyard, and the other would lead to a dead end. Seriously cool stuff, check it out. I took all these photos already having passed the passageway doors and tunnels.