Have you ever walked through a ghost town? You know, like in the movies, where the doors to the empty tavern are still swinging in the wind, where you can almost hear the music coming out of the playhouse while the showgirls dance on stage, and you see a general store with prices of flour and sugar in the broken window, but there's not a soul to be seen?
This morning I went for a run which took me through a deserted, once-popular hippodrome (horse race course) on the outskirts of Lyon. It was apparently one of the first built in France around the turn of the century -- the last century. The stands were made entirely from concrete, the kind of concrete that LOOKS ancient, large enough to hold five or six hundred people, as were the many stables spaced around the perimeter, even a small, concrete building still proudly claiming to be the weigh station for the race horses. Very eerie! I could almost hear the cheering from the empty stands as I ran one lap on the racetrack, imagining myself to be a jockey on the back of one of the speeding thoroughbreds.
I arrived in Lyon after midnight two nights ago. I drove in from Geneva with Christophe to stay a while in his childhood home, where his parents still live. His mother dotes over me and makes me wonder if maybe I should stay a little longer than planned. If you don't see me at the gym for a few weeks,... I never left Lyon!
Of course you remember Christophe, my ski instructor friend that I meet each year in Switzerland for a week of skiing. He helps me with my skiing and I help him with his English. I wrote you a postcard last year from Lyon, too, if I remember well, but what I did not tell you about then was the uniquely impressing panoramic views Lyon has to offer. If you look in the right direction, you can see the snow-covered summit of Mont Blanc, 120km away, with much of the rest of the French alps in front. Pick any other direction and you will see another mountain range, usually 40km in the distance, each with its own small, family ski hill where Lyonais can ski afternoons after working the morning in town. Sounds like a progressive work environment to me!
Except for the area called Part-Dieu, where much construction is taking place, Lyon has not changed at all in the last year. Still a LOT of students filling the cafes, fast-food joints and shopping streets downtown, feverishly texting messages to their friends or adjusting the volume on their iPods. Still many tourists snapping pictures of the beautiful, stately and very old city hall, with its gold-fringed, black fence on all sides, keeping us all at a distance. It seems to me that cities that are 500 years old don't feel the need to change as fast as newer cities. With all the monuments, churches and very ornately decorated older buildings, I think they believe they already have it all and so have nothing to prove.
Did I forget to mention that Lyon has not one, but two rivers running through its heart, the Rhone and the Soane? They meet up a little beyond the city limits, and then continue to flow south to Marseille. I was wondering if I could kayak its length, downstream of course, arriving on the Cote d'Azure fit and hungry for some well-deserved, local seafood. I like cities with smaller rivers, like Paris or Metz and Lyon, too. Lots of bridges to cross over or under, and to frame in the foreground of otherwise dull pictures. Wouldn't Montreal be so much more attractive with an additional canal running along Sherbrooke Street or Saint-Denis? I must mention this to the mayor next time we meet up!
Here's hoping there is nothing dull in your life!
Barry de Lyon
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