Lyon Life

So for the last week or so, I’ve mostly just been getting myself sorted with school and classes, while continuing to explore the city.

School here is really different, and I’m having to take 9 classes instead of the normal 5 back home...a bit strange and very intimidating, but it amounts to about the same amount of hours, so hopefully it will be ok. French school is a bit funny though, tutorials don’t start until 2 weeks in, and one class doesn’t start until October 7! …crazy French people….it turns out that this class is mandatory for all North Americans and Australians. Its a French Culture course haha..apparently we know nothing about the French culture.

Last week Elisa’s and my neighbour on our floor –a French girl named Mathilde-left us a note on the wall between our rooms attached to a tourism brochure. She told us that the upcoming weekend was “les journées européenes du patrimoine” …meaning that all museums and tourist spots were free! …we were so happy she told us and we ended up visiting two realllly cool museums and we also got to see one of the old roman amphitheatres that are here. It was incredible, and they actually still use it today for certain shows.

This weekend, I ended up getting to do a few cool things. First, my neighbour Babette who is super nice offered me her rollerblades to use because she was going home for the weekend and knew I would like to use them. I got to rollerblade all along the rhône river, it was so pretty and nice out! We also ended up going to an international pic-nic at la parc de la tete d’or. We’d been there before during our orientation when we first arrived in France, and it was so nice to go back this time! …we got sort of sidetracked when we discovered there was a zoo there haha and ended up wandering around the park for a couple of ours on our own. I had no idea but it turns out that they have a free zoo ( a good one with actually cool animals like giraffes!) and a bunch of cool botanical gardens! There were even special greenhouses for carnivorous plants as well as a Mexican garden. Which children are not allowed to play in...haha there was a sign.

Luckily for us we didn’t have too many unfortunate adventures this time apart from the crazy French men who all like to chat with you…but surprisingly you get used to that pretty quickly