I know it’s bad form to offer advice, but after three weeks in France, I recommend y’all spend as many lazy days in Lyon as you can afford. The food! Holy hell, the food. Paul Bocuse, freshly baked croissants, ateliers, brassieres, boulangerie, cafes, Bouchons, seaweed salads, Dim Sum, tuna risotto, burgers, truffle fries, homemade fat noodled Chinese soup, American style sandwiches, French tacos, Brazilian meat with just a little European funk but tastes incredible, chocolate cookies, white and dark, chocolate chaud, tea from Taiwan, Chai glacé, Chai latté, macchiato Latté, matcha latté, latté fucking latté, Swifties invading like locus, mint lemonade, fresh iced tea, cocktails at The Bathtub, arguing about French brandy and blue rubber duckies, Michelin rated pepper steak with servers wearing t-shirts, freshly cooked boba, what?! Boba is cooked?!, beef carpaccio as wide as my arms, and that’s just what I can remember off the dome. Ten euro bottles of wine that would run you a hundred bucks in a Chicago steakhouse. The walkability and public transport in a town that has two rivers. The Rhone and the Saone; when one grows old, hop the ‘almost island’ to imbibe a different perspective of the city. Views of the basilica on the hill and a Roman, 10,000-seat theater ruins. The bridges filled with statues, parks filled with statues of dead French men, and little versions of those statues in the gift shops. Red-pathed walking bridges light up at night—thin dirt paths under sprawling Linden trees. Spry elder folks playing Pétanque (French bocce ball). One lady has a silver magnet on a black nylon cable to help pick up the balls so she doesn’t tax her back. All the runners wear these tiny vests for their water bottles and keys—teeny, tiny vests.
Knowing people obviously helps. My opera-singing girlfriend got us into all sorts of enriching predicaments. A play turned into an opera in an abandoned church on the grounds of a mental hospital while actual patients in scrubs meander around a goat farm between buildings that felt oddly similar to Auschwitz. Another opera written by a Jewish composer in 1938 called Brundibár; the author was sent to the Czech concentration camp Terezin and still somehow produced 55 shows with the children from the original cast and was used as evidence of how well the Germans were treating the Jews. As the cast got sent from Terezin to Auschwitz, they had to keep re-casting new children as they arrived. Puts everything into perspective quickly. Saw Furiosa with Ema, and as we exited the movie theater, we stumbled into a protest brimming with French twenty-year-olds about what seemed like many, many different political topics. Public bitching thrives in the French DNA. Viva la bitching!!!
If any of this sounds tasty, egress the comforts of home cooking and tramp yo ass to France. If done right, it’s not as expensive as you might imagine.