Parfois, il pleut à Chambéry...

A rainy Sunday afternoon today...
Nevertheless I am in a very good mood :) In about an hour I will visit the Château de Chambéry with a new French friend, named Émeline. Pictures will follow no worries...

Never mind, I was not able to finish the blog before so here are some pictures from the castle. Today is "jour de partimonial" (cultural heritage day) so we could visit all cultural sites for free. However, the line to get into the castle was too long, so we decided to not go in ;)

Lyon´s city branding

But let´s start at the beginning of the week; my second week here. On Monday we had a "Grande Sortie" (meaning "excursion") to Lyon. Having been to Paris I was expecting something similar, but Lyon is very different. Even though one can recognize the French flair, it has almost something from Amsterdam (see picture, someone recognize " I AMSTERDAM...)

Because we still had class on Monday until 12.30 we left for Lyon at 1 pm. It was about an hour and a half by bus. After our arrival we had a 2 hr tour, guided by a bilingual woman, who actually spoke 4 languages fluently. I have to admit it was not a tiny bit boring. She told us different stories about Lyon and the old areas, we even got to see a famous play at 4 pm in a church (similar to a big "Kuckucksuhr"). When the tour was over we bought a metro ticket to take a cable car to "Basilika Notre Dame de Fouvière" from which one has a terrific view over Lyon.

Cary discovered the panorama mode on her camera :)

Inside of Fouvière

Basilika Fouvière

It was a gorgeous day with a again so much fun. Visiting Fouvière gives one an impression how many years it must have taken to complete the pieces of art. It is a fusion of the Gothic era with very detailed golden wall paintings. Frankly we spent quite some time in there and where absolutely not bored just fascinated by the beauty.

Time flew and it was time for dinner. Since we only had a couple of hours left we decided to take the next restaurant, where we also, by conincedence, met the rest of our group. Honestly, I have never eaten in such a bad restaurant before. We waited almost 45 min to order, because only one waitress was allowed to take orders. Moreover the silverware was dirty and my food (Tilapia fish with Ratatouille) was cold and not seasoned a bit. We were quite pissed and left without a tip. The better was the last hour which we spent at the Saône (Saône and Rhône are two rivers marching in Lyon). We just enjoyed a beautiful sunset and chatting together.

Saône 

All in all I must say the visit was too short to really get a picture of the city, but I am definitely in for another one.

Other than that I finished my preparatory language course on Thursday (finally) and had my first two lectures (introduction into hotel management and leisure pratices) in French on Friday. Yap, not even going to lie it was super hard. I understand a lot already, but taking notes at the same time is not easy. Fortunately I sat next to two French girls on Friday and one was like "oh you can copy my notes, we know that it is so difficult in the beginning". I also had the other lecture with her and so we spent the whole day together, which meant at least 6 hours of listining to French and speaking it. I also had to coordinate all my courses which turned out to be not quite that easy. Since we can take courses from L3 (French Bachelor consists of L1, L2 + L3) and M1 (French Master consists of M1, M2+M3) courses overlap and are not always corresponding. In addition the school keeps changing dates, hours and weeks... oh well! =)

To round it off this is a picture from last night with Émeline (the French girl), Demi (fellow Dutch student) and me.

À la prochaine fois! Bisou