Laura! Oh and Lyon too...

So I am in Lyon staying at my friend Laura's apartment on the banks of the Soane river and have had a lovely few days of sight-seeing and relaxing.

I had many wee adventures getting here and finding Laura. I left Verona at 9.50pm and got to Milan at midnight then got to hang out until 6.40 for a train to Paris, me getting off at Chambery. Milan has a waiting room which is handy but the benches are old wooden ones, like church pews, so I passed rather an uncomfortable night. Then it turned out that there is a limit to how many eurail tickets they'll sell for a French train and I had missed out so I had to pay full price (not too expensive, but unexpected costs are annoying.) Got to Chambery to discover that the train my eurail guide told me to take didn't exist so I caught the next suitable train and was half an hour late meeting Laura who was well panicked that she had missed me and I had handily forgotten which exit we were meant to meet at so I stood in the complete wrong place (knowing it was wrong but figuring that if I stood still for a while she might come to me) and voila, she appeared. I was waiing under the "meeting point" sign so the first thing she said, after a hug, was "But it's not our meeting point!" But it all worked out in the end so we should probably stop worrying about could-have-beens.

Lyon is lovely, a very pretty city with lots of cafes and patisseries so I'm quite at home. No gelatoso I've gone cold turkey there, but tarte praline is a pretty good substitute. Friday we went for lunch to a bagel place and then did some groceries and walked around the town. I was pretty exhausted, sleeping on a church pew for four hours isn't my body's idea of rest, so we hung out at home eating cheese, bread and salad and then watching Obama speeches - he's so impressive! I thought we should have had popcorn. Laura's flatmate Louis was in London until Sunday night so we got the space to ourselves for a bit. Louis studied in NZ for a year so we already know each other which is handy. Laura has to find a new flat at the end of the year because Louis is moving so she's been emailing and calling people to find something not-to-expensive and not-too-inconvenient. Of course those two features rarely go together!

Saturday we got up early and we climbed Fourvière and saw a big cathedral, then down the hill to look at a couple smaller churches but they weren't open until the qfternoon so we headed back to the apartment and ate baguette for lunch, it was super! In the afternoon we went for another walk, back to the churches which hadn't been open, one of which had five guys break-dancing outside, so that was fun to watch.We looked at the pretty churches and then went for a walk out the other direction where Laura introduced me to the delicious tarte praline. Dinner was nice, Laura invited Joanna, an American girl studying in Lyon, to dinner and she brought an apple pie for dessert. We went out for drinks nearby and had intended to go dancing but I still hadn't fully recovered from my train ordeal and was almost falling asleep at the table! It was a little embarrassing, especially since we were sharing our table with three English guys who we'd just met. I'm sure they have a great impression of New Zealanders now!

Sunday we were meeting some of Laura's friends to see an art exhibition at 11 so we went to the market early and had fun buying fruit and vege and cheese. We may have gone a tad overboard on the capsicum and courgettes but I'm sure we can just eat a lot of salad. The exhibition was of modern art from 1945-1949 so there was lots of Pollack and Rothko and then lots of European artists who we hadn't heard of so now I have a list of people to look up in my edu-Catie project! Sunday afternoon we hung out at the apartment mostly because that evening we were attending the ballet! Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet was being performed at the Opera House and Laura got two of the last three tickets available. It was really good, especially Juliet. The costumes and design were futuristic, the stage looked like something from Stargate, and they had cut out a lot because they wanted to shorten it, it was less than two hours and Tybalt was still alive at teh end so if you're familiar with the story you can imagine that Laura and I had a sort of "Huh?" moment at that! But the production was beautiful and we both teared up when Juliet was trying to wake up Romeo, always a good sign. It was fun gettin dressed up and going out and we had wine and cake afterwards since it wasn't very late.

Monday was a bit of a lazy chore day. We woke up late, talked to NZ for two hours then went to do our laundry then groceries. It was just a get-stuff-done kinda day. We had to go on a mission to find a camera cord because I cleverly left mine in Florence! We went to three different plqces before the guy in the last place told us we'd have to order one in for €30 and it would take 30 days so why not just buy a card reader? So that's how we solved my problem in the end, now I have a multi-card reader which does the same job. Tuesday was Armistice which is a public holiday so it seemed like lots of places closed for Monday too, wanted an extended weekend. Laura made a pretty fabulous lasagne for dinner (I pretty much bullied her into it because Joanna had talked about how good it had been.) I spent the whole evening transfering photos to CD because I only had space on my camera for 3 more photos!

Monday night was also ny interview for the journalism course which I want to do next year. I rang using Skype and then discovered that my earpiece was broken so I ended up calling ten minutes late, but he was very nice about that. I guess you cacn't expect calling long-distance to go without incident! I had practised a lot of answers and thought a lot about what he would ask but the interview went really well and after 11 minutes when he asked if I had applied to any other programmes I said "No, if I don't get into this course I'll have to consider my other options" and he said "I don't think you'll need to worry about that." So there was smiling and arm-pumping and trying to sound like a grown-up on the phone. I should receive an official letter at the end of November but since I'll be in Ireland I'll have to rely on my family to be privacy invaders so we can have official arm-pumping and smiling and cheering.

Tuesday we went for a walk, public holiday etc everything was closed, but we picked a bad day because it was raining off and on all day. We headed up a hill and found a market and a carnival of all things! Got quiche for lunch, hid in a cafe from the rain, ran when it stopped for a minute and found nuttella crepes, very exciting. So we headed down the hill with our yummy hazelnutty treat and decided to see a film since it was such a rotten day. We had to find one which doesn't dub stuff so we ended up in a wee arty place and saw The Visitor which is about a depressed widower and illegal immigrants in New York, very good, we liked it.

Dinner was at Joanna's with her friend Michelle so it was a nice English speaking evening. All Laura's French friends speak excellent English but I feel bad making them speak my language when obviously they could all converse quite comfortably in French if I weren't there.

That's it for today, talk to you again from Barcelona! Oh and forgive typoes, French keyboards are crazy!