Actually, I do have a good excuse or two: for the first week of my spring break, I was flat broke and had nothing interesting to report (buying a plane ticket to the US tends to do that, ugh), and for the second week (once I'd been paid), I was too sick to spend any money traveling. Then all of a sudden two weeks have passed and I'm out of the habit of blogging, and really I ought to be spending all my free time studying for the DALF (diplome approfondi de langue française, a language fluency certification exam I'm taking next week) anyway... you know how it goes.
Of course there's nothing like having a test to procrastinate studying for to motivate me to blog, so finally it's time to catch up! I'll try to make keep these on the shorter side so as to not completely screw myself over for this 90 € test I've just paid for.
Despite being first broke and then sick, I did manage to leave St-Etienne on the one day a full bank account and good health overlapped during the break to go on a day-trip to Lyon with some friends. My friend Andrenne was showing friends of hers from back home around Lyon, and a few others of us decided to tag along.
Our first objective upon arrival was to track down a bouchon, one of the meat-centric (specifically pork) restaurants that Lyon is famous for. We wound up at Chez Georges, a tiny little restaurant tucked in a side street near the Opéra (to the left, checking out the menu). It was a really cute little place, and we wound up almost all getting the menu of the day, which was poached eggs in a beet/mushroom/onion sauce followed by almond-crusted baked fish in a cream sauce. Not very strange-pig-part intensive at all, and ooooh so delicious.
As it was Andrenne's friends' first and only day in Lyon, we spent the afternoon hitting up Fourvière and some other main areas I'd been to before, and then we went to the Opéra in the evening. Verdi's Luisa Miller was on the schedule, and it was a really lovely performance (especially for 13 € last minute tickets!). The only downside to our cheap tickets was that we couldn't all sit together, but it worked out since I wound up getting shuffled from only a partial view of the stage to front row center of the (albeit fourth) balcony.
In order to make up for lost time during the break (and also since now especially I realize I'm running out of time), I went again to Lyon during the first week back of school. I don't have class on Wednesday and had been talking for a while with my friend Stephanie about going "trabouling" in Vieux Lyon and Croix Rousse, and we figured that was as good a day as any. Traboules are old, somewhat secret corridors between and under buildings (which were extensively used during the Resistance), and the old part of Lyon is teeming with them.
And finally, I made an appallingly recent gastronomic discovery: macarons. I'd always ignored them in the boulangeries because they looked like they'd be nothing but dry little sandwich cakes, but oh boy was my judgement in error there. Steph had first introduced me to them a couple days before, and by last Wednesday I had been fully converted to being a macaron-lover. We sought out Sève, a macaron shop on the bank of the Saone River, and each feasted on a handful of macarons:
Mine were framboise (raspberry), praliné (hazelnut), and beurre de caramel salé (salted caramel butter), and I've also previously tasted chocolate and pistachio. Suffice to say they were divine. The color may be off-putting to some, but I anticipate that these delicously moist and flavorful cookies (if you can call them cookies?) will be pervading my dreams for a while to come.I hate to just throw up such a disjointed post, but it's already long overdue! I'm off to Toulouse tomorrow for the weekend with Vanessa and have a wee bit of a backlog of other entries I've been meaning to write, so I may come back and flesh this out at some later point.
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