Our First Full Day in Lyon!

As promised, this is what the stairwell of our Airbnb looks like:

Lots of character, lots of walking carefully to make sure I don’t trip and fall and break my neck.

One of the best parts about going somewhere new is that even the most mundane of tasks feels new and exciting. Need to go grocery shopping? Check out the fancy fish display.

It’s a little embarrassing just how long we spent wandering around our local Monoprix. Kristian rightly pointed out that we should only purchase what we need. But, just the essentials included things like jam and yogurt, and they have so many varieties and flavors that we don’t get back home. Even picking a jar of honey involved a decent amount of translation on my part. We purchased a little cart that we can tote our groceries around in. I think the novelty of it will encourage Lilian to help with the shopping… at least for a little bit.

We did some wandering this afternoon. It turns out there’s a craft supply store less than 5 minutes from us. This is both exciting and dangerous. It’s not pictured (it’s for a present) but I bought a couple “pelotes” of yarn for a little project.

We also found what I can only assume is Little Boston. I don’t know why there are several pubs in a row that all have the word “Boston” in the name. At some point, I supposed I will have to venture inside and find out what the French think of us. I’d love to hear your guesses. I’m thinking they will probably look like our generic “Irish” pubs. Maybe they’ll surprise me and it will be wall to wall Dunks and people throwing tea into harbors.

We also went to “La Baguetterie,” which doesn’t mean delicious crusty bread in this context. It means drumsticks (it being a drum store and all). I was today years old when I learned that the baguette as a type of bread only dates back to 1920. We purchased a 3/4 sized cajon for Lilian to practice with. Because nothing says “we live in an apartment now” like getting drums for your kid.

We also made a small pit stop at a cafe across the river in the old town. This is where I discovered that it’s actually harder to order when the menu is in English (tell me you cater to tourists without telling me that you cater to tourists). It’s a lot easier to have the french in front of you and do a quick translation in your head. Ordering a coffee is one thing, but how do you say “homemade orange blossom lemonade?”

Answer: it’s a citronnade à la fleur d’oranger. Which is a vocabulary word that I really should remember. Because it was delicious. Like a less-sweet slushie, if the slushie had orange blossom water in it.

As you can see, Kristian and Lilian took the lemonade situation extremely seriously.

We topped the day off with some downtime, an amazing dinner at one of the restaurants downstairs from us, and a walk along the river. Lilian discovered that they actually do like burrata. This is a huge weight off of my shoulders, because I’d say a good 60% of the vegetarian options we’ve seen in restaurants here are burrata based. Lilian is still not sure how they feel about stinky cheese, but Rome wasn’t built in a day.

My watch says that I walked over 14,000 steps today, and I feel every single one of them. Probably because it also says that I climbed 11 flights of stairs (and now you know how steep they are!).

Tomorrow, we go out in search of bike helmets and attempt to rent e-scooters.