This one should be quick – most of the 13th and 14th were travel days by train. I stopped in Lille, a little town in Northern France, for the night – otherwise it would have been about 16 hours by train. I’ve found that the slower travel is worth it for me – less recovery time when I do get to my destination.
While walking to the train station in Lyon, I stopped at a cafe for breakfast, and snapped a few photos along the way.
A warning about high voltage inside!A view across the river Rhone.The gates of the Park of the Golden Head in Lyon
One neat thing I’ve noticed in Lyon – there are cracks in the sidewalks that have been filled in with little mosaics. According to one local I met, this is all the work of a street artist called Ememem (named for the sound his moped makes). He calls this art “flacking” – turning cracked blemishes in the sidewalks into public works of art that are owned by all.
The one on the left was the first thing I took a picture of in Lyon!
After a few hours on the train (during which I technically stopped in Paris, but only to switch trains), I was in Lille!
The trains here are often quite comfortable! FAR more than airlines in the US.The train station in Lille was very pretty.This is what a lot of “Old Lille” looked like. Cobbled streets with pedestrians everywhere, old buildings, and beautiful architecture.
I was pretty tired from travel, so I got myself a (supposedly) nice dinner (I don’t know if it was just not something I liked or if this restaurant wasn’t great) of Flemish (local) cusine, and turned in for the night.
It did look nice at least, and the salad and fries were delicious! The croquets left something to be desired though.
Lille -> Amsterdam, 4/14:
Breakfast was a mocha and a delicious breakfast sandwich at an apparently very popular cafe.
As I traveled on the train, it became pretty obvious as I drew closer to Amsterdam – windmills began passing by every now and then. I didn’t manage to catch any out the window, but I did snap a photo of this cool old warehouse.
Amsterdam’s train station was also really cool looking! I didn’t have much time to stop though – my next train left in 5 minutes so I had to run to the next platform!
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After crossing a large canal with a ton of other people on foot and bike, I was almost to my hostel (the red building in the photo below).
The room in the hostel is utilitarian, but comfortable and quiet. I don’t spend a lot of time in there anyway!
That’s all for this day! Still no Mopeds 😉 But, I can rent them here! We will see when it happens. I’m a little scared to have that much power on the roads of Amsterdam 😛
The view from my AirBNB was fantastic РI was up on the 9th floor of a high-rise building built up on a hill overlooking the Rh̫ne river, which flows from the Alps down to the Mediterranean Sea.
My AirBNB also had two persian cats, who were both very friendly.
Every time I came back to the AirBNB at night, the white one would follow me around meowing – I think all she wanted were pets, since when I did pet her for a few minutes, she stopped meowing (and she had food and water).
This definitely isn’t as old as real cave art – but was a remarkably good recreation as grafitti near my AirBNB.
Breakfast today was fast – a cappuchino and a chocolate (not actually a croissant, but that’s what we call it in the US).
Nearby the cafe, there was a street market selling CDs, Records, Posters, and books/comics.
Tintin was popular here – but that makes sense, Tintin is from Belgium, not far away.OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Afte this, I went to a cute antique sovinour store and picked up a couple of trinkets for friends back home. They had vintage postcards from Lyon – much cooler in my opinion than most new ones (if less usable as postcards because of already being used :P)
My camera does not do well in low light, and most of the museum was darkly lit. Most of the props look better in the movies anyway. However, I did see some from movies I enjoy a lot, particularly from Wes Anderson’s films – there was a whole room dedicated to his work, with props from the Grand Budapest, Isle of Dogs, Astroid City, and others.
In an adjacent room was a short film showing some behind-the-scenes looks at how Astroid City was filmed and the props it involved. I really enjoyed seeing this – Anderson’s team creates a 3D model of most of the world the film is set in, and then builds as needed at different scales. The train from Astroid City was about 1/10th the real life size, for example. Of course things that humans interact with, like the diner, are real size.
After a few other stops including a (currently non-functioning) animatronic from Alien, I headed up to the miniatures floor.
This whole scene, titled Apartment of the 80’s (translated from French), was about 1x1x2′ width x height x depth. These chairs are about 1.5″ tall!
This was honestly the more interesting part of the museum for me – a lot of the movie props were kind of gross looking and were much better in the movies…
I wish this place existed full size!
But the miniatures! I had to stop myself from taking a picture of EVERY single one.
Some of the scenes were just still lifeSome looked out of a dungeons and dragons world…Others from an older time…Or a long-forgotten space.
After the museum, I slowly meandered back to my AirBNB on foot, and took more photos along the way.
This is the closest to a Cybertruck they have in Lyon. Good thing – it would not fit on the roads here.
Sorry for the long delay between posts! I’ve been remarkably busy since leaving Lyon. Amsterdam is great – I’ve rented a bike to explore the city, three days only cost 21 euro!
More posts to come – I’m sitting at a bakery hoping to write just a few more before I continue exploring 🙂
Today’s travels (4/13) have me headed from Lyon to Lille, both in France. Tomorrow, train schedules willing, I’ll finally be in Amsterdam – but to be honest, I’ve loved my time in Lyon and am sad to leave.
There are gonna be a LOT of photos in this one, since I spent most of the 11th walking around the amazing Parc de la Tête d’Or – or “Park of the head of gold”. According to Benoit (pronounced like Ben-whee), a local I met, legend has it that Louis 16 buried a head made of gold shortly after this park’s construction. Digging is, of course, forbidden. Wikipedia’s version of the legend says that Jesus’s head is supposedly be buried here. I guess legends change source to source, maybe that’s part of what makes them legends 😉 Either way, the parcel of land has been named this since before 1530!
One of the (many) attractions of the park is a section of botanical gardens. There are several very old greenhouses full of plants, and of course I explored them.
The parc was full of people jogging, lounging, exploring. Many were locals, though I could tell some were tourists like myself. It seems a popular place – the largest parc in Lyon, and apparently today was pretty sunny compared to the last few days. Everyone was out!
The greenhouses created some almost sci-fi shapes, which I enjoyed photographing.
While next to the one on the left, I also snapped a selfie in the reflection of the glass 🙂
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One of the coolest greenhouses had carnivorous plants! Not a lot of Venus Flytraps, but a TON of other types. I was really into carnivorous plants for a while, so I recognized a lot of these.
Sundews like these have long slender leaves with little hairs on them. Each hair has a glob of sweet, sticky sap to attract and trap insects. Once trapped, the leaf slowly curls around the insect to digest it.
When I had sundews, they tried to flower often! The flower must rise far above the plant, so as not to eat the pollinators 😛
Pitcher plants like this rely on their deep “pitchers” to catch prey and slowly digest them. The pitchers evolved to make it difficult to escape the slippery walls once an unwitting bug falls in.
There are SO many different species, and this greenhouse had a lot!
The pitcher plants took up most of this greenhouse, and their flowers were beautiful!
Butterworts like these look harmless enough, but their wide flat leaves are like flypaper – sticky, sweet smelling, and hard to escape once landed on! They also tend to have pretty flowers.
A few more pictures from the greenhouse:
The parc also had a free zoo! I didn’t walk through the zoo, but I did see a couple of zoo animals and a number of resident parc animals.
Duckling for JoshOLYMPUS C5050
As I continued to wander the parc, I discovered a large lake (well, I knew about it from Google Maps) in the middle of the parc. This is where I found most of the geese in the gallery above – but as I walked, I heard piano music and singing drifting across the lake (Zombie, by the Cranberries). I made my way around (eventually) and found a public piano with a crowd of people gathered around.
I took a video – but be warned, this is a digital camera from 2003 – video technology on consumer digital cameras was . . . not great. The sound is fine, but it is actually 240P quality.
Sometimes when I’m walking around a new area taking photos, I see things that I like more for the texture or color than the photo itself. Here’s a collection of these types of photos:
Besides the main attractions, the park was also filled with various little structures – benches, wells, grounds houses, and more.
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There was even a mini train around part of the parc!
I did not have time to explore the whole parc – by 5PM, I was able to check in to my AirBNB (I wanted a break from 16-person rooms), and I’d been walking since 11AM!
A few more photos from the parc and my walk to the AirBNB.
After resting and unpacking, I went back out for dinner (Tacos – but totally different than in the US, more like burritos with kebab/gyro filling) and went to a parc with a view over the city for sunset.
Sorry Katerina and Felix, no mopeds in this post. This was before you sent me Moped money! Mopeds are way less common in Lyon than they were in Barcelona, but I’m sure I’ll find one to rent before the 19th. I did try the rental bikes in Lyon though, and they seem to be the fastest way for short distances (besides a car, if you can find parking, maybe).
That’s all for now! Posts for 4/12 to come 🙂 I may not make a post for today, if there isn’t much to see – after the train, I plan to be lazy in my Airbnb in Lille for the rest of the day and go to bed early.
Today was a travel day! My route would take me from Barcelona-Sants (a train station here) to Lyon, France, where I would take a couple different trains spanning most of the day to get there.
I did have time for a quick breakfast at the closest cafe – one that was clearly themed for American tourists. Their food was a little pricier, but it was still delicious – the omelet and smoothie both, and the cortado I had was also tasty.
After that, it was a quick rush via the metro to my train station, where I arrived ~15 minutes early, then waited nervously for the sign to update and show me which platform to go to (mine was Cerbere).
We finally boarded the train and I was on my way!
I discovered that taking photos was hard – first, the windows are somewhat dirty. Next, we are speeding along quite quickly – quite a bit faster than cars on freeways here go! Google says around 320 km/hr for high speed trains in France, which I think I was on (that’s about 199 MPH).
Most of the landscape was like this, but occasionally nestled in the hills would be the ruins of a grand ancient building.
Lastly, I didn’t always get a window seat and sometimes that meant I didn’t want to be the one American tourist reaching over people to take a photo of the (for them, very normal) sights.
So – enjoy this small collection of blurry photos from the first leg of the trip 😛 (This is the Spanish countryside, we aren’t in France yet at this point.)
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As I rode this trip, I noticed another english-speaking tourist about my age sitting across the isle from me. He was reading a book about the social history of artificial intelligence and took out a film camera to shoot a few pictures out the window, so figuring I’d get along with him I struck up a conversation towards the end of the trip.
Sam is from London, and is on a little several-week trip of his own via train around Europe. He was also on the next train I was on, so we decided to sit together (I sweetened the deal with the promise of Uno).
While changing trains, we also met Laila, who’s been studying abroad in Madrid since January, and is from California! They were happy to join our little crew for Uno, so we found a booth with a table on the next train and played Uno, talked about public transit in the States VS in Europe (Europe wins by a landslide), our travel experiences, and our future plans and hopes for work (none of us want to find ourselves locked into a corporate job that keeps us there because it pays well, but also, money is important for quality of life . . . )
Laila also taught me how to say “Parles-tu anglais?” (Do you speak english?) – something that has become extremely useful in the last 24 hours, and also a majority of my French vocabulary (aside from “Oui” (yes) “Non” (no) and “Merci” (thank you)).
At the next station, we all had different trains, but we exchanged WhatsApp contact information, and I got a selfie of us all before we parted ways.
Train friends!!!Hi Laila!
I had about an hour before my connecting train arrived, so I wandered around Narbonne (the town we stopped in) and found someplace to grab lunch. The waitress’s answer to “Parles-tu anglais?” was a quick “non” – so I fumbled through Google translate and showing her my phone’s screen until she procured a simple baguette ham sandwich and an orange juice for 6,85 euro. I think by the end we were both relieved to have survived the interaction!
The rest of the trip was relatively uneventful. I did not have a window seat so I wasn’t able to grab a lot of pictures – but I did snap this one of the golden-hour countryside through the water spot stained window.
Lastly, there was this really cute little dog on the train. I really wanted to pet it, but I wasn’t sure if that would be ok.
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