I went to Carrefour this morning, one of the big French supermarket chains. Shopping at one of these is nothing compared to Tesco or Morrisons in the UK. One thing does seem similar however, which is the love for meat in both countries. There were aisles of endless varieties of different hams, sausages and cheeses, something I don’t think I would ever really see in the UK. I also managed to sort out a French phone number which is a relief to have ticked off my ‘to-do’ list.

The afternoon I met with Hana and Ida, two of the exchange girls, and we ventured into Lyon. Together, we walked through the old part of Lyon where we were living the tourist life with a number of different maps in our hands, camera’s at the ready, and taking plenty of ‘selfies’. We walked through little cobblestone streets and had a gorgeous view of the whole city spread out before us as we walked up the Fourvière hill direction the basilica. This picture probably doesn’t even do it justice.

When we reached the basilica, we first rewarded ourselves for walking up that steep hill with ice cream - a hot summer’s day is never really complete without ice cream. Once we re-gained our breath, we walked in and around the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière. It is dedicated to the Virgin Mary who rescued the city from an epidemic in 1823 and symbolically overlooks the whole city. We then made our way back to place bellecour to wander through some shops. We quickly realised however, that this is really the centre of Lyon and would therefore mostly find the higher end shops here. So because we try to be careful with money (aka we’re stingy) we went to Perrache – one of the big stations in Lyon, where we discovered some more local shops.

The evening was spent barbequing with some family friends, and getting to know some new people again. Although at times keeping up with conversations in french is still somewhat challenging and tiring, we all had a pretty good time.