Echecs

My Lyon host, who is the most charming and helpful stranger, introduced me to a 'brilliant' app called 'VisitACity', where you can read up on places, select or reject them and it then plans the best route and tells you how long it takes to walk between the places you've chosen. It told me, as I already knew, that museums are closed on Mondays so I'd planned my museum day - particularly the textile museum and the printing and graphics museum - for today.

Except... my starting point was St Martin's Abbey, because it's near where I'm staying and opens earlier than most places, but when I got there a notice on the door said that it was closed today - exceptionellement - for a clean.

Ah well, on to the cathedral, whose entrance door I failed to find yesterday. It was a much calmer space than yesterday's screaming basilica but the astronomical clock, which was all that really interested me, was stopped for refurbishment. But I did enjoy listening to the primary school teacher outside preparing his pupils for a visit. An excellent and engaging combination of informing and questioning with no assumption that any of them already knew anything about the cathedral, religion or Christianity.

Anyway, on to the amphitheatre. Surely nothing can go wrong (apart from the climb) with a place that's open in daylight hours all year round. I climbed, fortified by a bag of greengages, and found that it may well be open to the sky but the gates are not open to the public...

Ah well, back south to Place Bellecour, an absolutely vast square in the 'shopping area'. The shopping area turned out to be lots of intriguing small shops not tedious chains which definitely made it more appealing (see second extra for a shop too narrow for a queue). But Place Bellecour? I'm sure when it's full of protestors it's buzzing and vibrant but today? Vast and boring.

Ah well, on to the Textile Museum, intended highlight of my visit, definitely open on Tuesdays. Except (should have checked the website and not relied on the app) it's closed long-term for refurbishment.
Rather belatedly I checked the website of my next planned stop, the Lyon Museum of Printing and Graphic Communication and discovered it's closed on Tuesdays despite what the app says...

Ah well, on to my fallback destination for tomorrow, the Confluence Museum, at the tip of the peninsula where the Rhone and Saône rivers meet. Lots of people had talked about its impressive architecture though I hadn't seen any images that appealed to me. Anyway, it turned out to be open so off I trekked. They proudly market the architecture as 'deconstructivist' by which I think they mean throwing out all architectural guidelines. Certainly the form follows neither function nor physics and there's nothing aesthetically appealing about it. The contents are an amalgamation from earlier museums of artefacts pillaged from around the world and although they've tried to make a coherent contemporary story out of them (four themes: origins of life and evolutionary paths; human beings in the web of life; human societies; thinking about the beyond) I went to the last two and wasn't wowed. The last one was full of religion and philosophy but had no space for those of us who simply think about death as part of our lives. I 'ought' to have enjoyed the temporary exhibition, 'Africa - a thousand lives of objects', especially since quite a few artefacts came from Cameroon, but most of it left me cold. By far the best bit was a temporary exhibition of photos by Marc Riboud, impressively displayed without any reference to chronology, place or theme. Compelling.

So what went right in my 10km/6miles of walking today? Mostly, walking through lots of streets and getting a sense of Lyon.