To begin our stop in the food capital of France, Europe…maybe the world, Lyon, we arrived at our hotel and entered a lift with one other gentleman, before the poor ascendeur had a fit and sounded real alarm bells…way louder than the metaphorical ones we’ve been ignoring for five weeks.  630kg limit in this lift…our bags are really getting a lot heavier than we thought.  Our hotel also had trick mirrors for some reason, which was kind of cool like Luna Park, where if you turn side on, the lower half of your abdomen appears to extrude a good foot or so more than the rest, so clever.

After this initial wake up call, we responded by going straight out to a cute little bouchon, which is unique to Lyon and can mean tiny restaurant, tourist trap, traffic jam, plug, bottle shop, cork…., we found it to be a mixture of all of the above.  After a default five courses of random foods, your intestines feel like a traffic jam, with a plug at one end and a bottle shop at the other…and that’s how you’d feel even you didn’t eat the beautifully cut radishes that became clear were meant as a table decoration….my secret shame 😦

Apart from two amazing meals in bouchons (one which brought James to tears…in food agony, it was the other one where the tears were shame at eating the floral arrangements) we also: saw the beautiful and modern basilica (owned by the people not the church, win…assume it’s available for weddings, parties…bah mitsvas), caught our first funicular since Zagreb (which thankfully, despite the crowd, didn’t sound alarms and get fingers pointing); saw the incredibly well manicured Roman ruins (again so much better than Rome); drank on our balcony; saw a girl walking through the old town carrying a mattress (not saying she was easy…but….); walked through many of the Traboules, built as hidden streets within the buildings in order to cover the shame of the over indulged as they crawl from bouchon to the nearest porcelain bus; and took a walk into the new area of town being developed – the Confluence – where they’ve built some space-like buildings to either cover up, or what seemed more likely, to funnel business to the tourist-stabby part of town.  We made it past the first “James, don’t say anything to bring attention to us being tourists” moment (jokes on Lea, I still had the town map sticking out of my pocket) before turning back to the nearest wine and cheese bar.  We also had our first escargot of the trip, which were a little slow to come out…

Lyon was a beautiful town, well worth the visit.  A more appropriate itinerary would be: one day in Lyon eating at bouchons, two days in bed sweating and crying…and repeat.