Lunch in Geneva and Dinner in Lyon

On Thursday, July 23, we had an early breakfast and said goodbye to Andreas, and Eva drove us to the station.  We bought our tickets and Eva waited with us for the 8:29 train to Lucerne.  We said goodbye and headed off on our longest day of train travel.  We changed trains in Lucerne, and at 11:46 we arrived in Geneva, where we had decided to make a lunch stop.  We had about three-and-three-quarter hours, so first we visited the restrooms.

Public restrooms in Europe are generally pay.  Sometimes (as at the TGV train station in Avignon), there is a live person whom you pay at a desk.  At the Geneva station there is a coin-operated turnstile--one euro or one-and-a-half Swiss francs.  Given current exchange rates, where the euro and franc have nearly the same value, a little more than a dollar, one would be better off paying the euro of course.  However, we were leaving Switzerland, had Swiss coins and didn't have euro coins.  Mary Joy put in a franc and three twenty-cent coins, she was about to go through the turnstile, when she realized that the machine had given her ten cents change.  When she went back to pick it up, however, the turnstile turned over and she was locked out.  Just then, a man went through, and Mary Joy went through right after him.  The machine didn't like this, however, and made noises, alerting the restroom attendant, who told Mary Joy that she couldn't do that.  She responded rather vehemently that she had every right to do that, because she had paid her one franc fifty but had been locked out while collecting her change.  The attendant didn't look convinced, but gave up, muttering the French equivalent of "Whatever."

Tourist Information, just outside the station, told us where to store our luggage (there are lockers in the station, but they're hard to find) and gave us a map.  We walked across the Rhone and up the hill to the Old Town, then went into the medieval cathedral.  Mary Joy didn't care for its Calvinist austerity.

 When we came out, there were a couple of Geneva Tourist Angels, dressed in orange tee-shirts and baseball caps, pointing something out on a map for some people.  Mary Joy suggested asking them where to eat lunch.  I didn't think they would be allowed to recommend a particular restaurant, but when Mary Joy asked them if there were someplace nearby where we could eat good food inexpensively and quickly, they immediately suggested a restaurant called Chez Ma Cousine.  This was a good tip.  They specialize in chicken, particularly, a roasted half-chicken with potatoes and a salad.  According to them, their chickens must be nearly as happy and self-fulfilled as the Dutch chickens that laid the eggs for our sandwiches on the flight to Copenhagen.  Mary Joy had one of these menus, along with a good local wine, and was very pleased with both.  I don't remember what I had, but I remember liking it.

We then went down to the lakefront, where people were taking pictures of other people with the 459-foot-high spray of the Jet d'Eau fountain in the background.  Of course, we did the same.

We walked awhile along the lakeshore, which was crowded and noisy and not very pretty, then turned and walked back to the station, where we caught the 3:30 train to Lyon.

We arrived at Lyon's Part-Dieu railroad station a little before 5:30.  The first order of business was to get a French SIM card for the phone we had bought in Basel.  We had not been thrilled with this phone.  How to use it wasn't intuitive, and our Salt contract was more expensive to call with than we'd expected--a third of a franc per minute to Swiss numbers and a whole franc to the U.S.  After a few strikeouts we found an SFR French SIM card for five euros at a news-tobacco shop.

Then we found the Metro station, bought tickets (I was a little worried because someone on some website hadn't been able to use his American credit card in the machine, but my Visa worked), took the B line two stops, to Charpennes, changed to the A line and went three stops to Hotel de Ville (City Hall).  Across the street from the rear of the Hotel de Ville is The 1831 Opera House, as renovated, with a new barrel-vaulted glass and steel top floor, by Jean Nouvel (see previous post).

We went around the Hotel de Ville, and at the northeast corner of the Place des Terreaux  (a large square faced by the Hotel de Ville and the Musee de Beaux Arts, and with a large fountain by Bartholdi, creator of the Statue of Liberty), we headed up the hill into the Croix-Rousse district.  A few minutes later, we were in front of an unmarked door.  I typed a number code on a keypad, then opened the door onto a passageway, into a courtyard.  The next day we would discover that this was exactly like one of the city's famous "traboules," except that it wasn't open to the public and there wasn't another passage through to the other side of the block.  We crossed the courtyard and the apartment door directly ahead had the sign for our B&B, Nos Chambres en Ville.

We were warmly welcomed by our hostess, Karine, whose English is good, but she was more comfortable speaking French with Mary Joy, whose French she later complimented.  Our room, on the ground floor, facing the courtyard, was very pleasant.

I tried to insert the new SIM card into the phone, but it wouldn't work.  When I tried taking out and putting back the battery, then the phone itself went completely dead!  After trying for quite a while to get it to work, I gave up and bought ten euros worth of time on Skype for the iPad.  The principal reason for wanting the phone was so Mary a Joy could call her mother, and while we could only use Skype for phoning when we had WiFi, that would presumably work for Mary Joy's purposes, most of the time.  We tried phoning, got the answering machine and left a message.  Mary Joy wondered why no one was home.  Actually, we discovered later, caller ID on her mother's phone indicated that it was a spam call, so no one picked up, and no one listened to the message.

Now it was time for dinner.  I had Lonely Planet's Lyon guide on the iPad, so we picked out an interesting restaurant in the neighborhood and went to find it.  One problem with visiting European cities in July or, especially, August, is that all the city-dwellers take their vacations then, and, as we would discover in a few days, go to Provence, or some similar tourist destination.  Eric Rohmer made a film (The Green Ray) about a young French woman's need to find the perfect escape from Paris, since everyone else is gone, and although she is alone and depressed from a recent breakup, she can't simply stay in the city during summer vacation.  Restaurateurs also go on vacation, and that was the case with the restaurant that we had chosen.  Since I had the iPad along in my daypack, we looked for a nearby alternative.

La Boname de Bruno was in a classy, high-ceilinged room.  Mary Joy had a smoked salmon appetizer in a very refined sauce, with herbs, while I had an unusual gazpacho--it had the normal tomato base, but with chunks of avocado and smoked herring!  We both had for the main dish a rice-vegetable salad with shrimp, slices of duck breast and a tamarind sauce.  Dessert for me was a tiramisu on a bed of mixed berries, I think, while Mary Joy had roasted figs with anise sauce and anise ice cream.  All very, very nice.  Lyon has the reputation for being the cuisine capital of France (just like, as I later pointed out on Facebook, Mary Joy's hometown of Monroe, Wisconsin is the cheese capital of Wisconsin).  We had some truly wonderful meals in Lyon, and this was one of them.