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EDIT (1/21): Missing Photos added!

Sorry for the delay – I’ve been trying to do a pano stitch photo that didn’t work out with PS CS3 nor Hugin. I just gave up at the end, so no pano photo from Day 3.

December 27, 2010
After an eventful evening, we had a relatively late start (around 9am or so) as we walked to the local metro station to begin our tour of Lyon. On our way we passed by a local pastry shop (where we grabbed a small breakfast), a local supermarket (where we later bought supplies such as water) and a McDonalds (where we ended up getting breakfast for the next 2 days). We bought a day pass for the metro, and transferred to a funicular (tram) at the Vieux Lyon metro station to the Fourvière Basilica, a 19th century massive church with antique, classical and Gothic architectural elements and a Byzantine-style interior finish. Nearby the church is a Panoramic viewpoint of the city, although the weather proved to be cold and sucky and everything turned out to be somewhat greyish.

Lyon is a 2000 year old city with Roman roots, and as we walked down from the hill we passed by the Roman theater, remanant from the Roman city of Lugdunum. My friend commented how Roman theaters always appear to have a lot of historical significance but always ends up being a really boring sightseeing spot.

We walked by down to the Vieux Lyon metro station, toured the area a bit (including St. Jean Cathedral) and ended up walking into a bar where we all grabbed a hot drink since it was freezing cold walking around outside. I ordered a vin chaud (hot wine) since it seemed special on the menu, and it literally was heated red wine that is a French specialty which I find to taste like… Chinese herbal tea >.<

Taking the metro back towards the downtown core of Lyon, we followed our Lonely Planet guidebook to a famous local restaurant called Restaurant Léon de Lyon. We arrived at 11:30am, and they don’t start serving lunch until noon, so we ended up walking around the area and discovered a few gems like the Museum of Beaux Arts and this frozen fountain in front of the Lyon city building.

Lunch at Leon de Lyon was very fancy – the decor inside was very nice and the waiters were dressed in very nicely tailored suits (all of us had that same thought about our waiter’s suit). The entree (which is our appetizer) was very good, but their plait (which would be our entree) was a little disappointing – I ordered some form of beef and it tasted like food from Hong Kong’s Cafe de Coral.

After lunch we walked around Lyon a little bit more and then subwayed to this section of time along the Rhone River where there are buildings with giant, life-sized murals painted on their exterior walls. After a few photos we got a call from Hertz and headed back to the hotel so we can get our rental car.

Hertz actually contacted us at lunch and suggested they will send us a cab to take us to the Lyon airport to get a replacement rental car. However, when booking hotels I noticed the airport is actually at least 30 minutes way from downtown (which is where we’re staying), so we suggested if we can pick up a car from the Hertz that is walking distance away from our hotel instead. For whatever reason, they settled on asking us to pick up a new rental car from the train station instead (I think other Hertz locations don’t have a large enough fleet of cars for us to take one on demand). So while the 2 girls rested and napped, the other guy (who couldn’t drive stick but the rental is under his name) and I hopped onto the cab and went to the train station on the other side of town (and river), which is still a good 20 minutes away.

Hertz at the Lyon train station was not ready for us to pick up the car at all – apparently they weren’t notified we were going to come and take a car from them (which seems extremely odd considering Hertz sent us the cab to pick us up from the hotel). After waiting around for things to be sorted out, we requested for an automatic car (although secretly the girl driver and I admitted to each other that we wanted to keep driving manual so we can get practice and be proficient at it), upon which the Hertz agent immediately said they have no automatic cars available. After checking her inventory, she found out there is an automatic car available but it is 3 classes above our booking. While we don’t mind paying the additional cost, 3 classes above our booking would mean a very large car (we booked one class size above a Compact already), so we ended up sticking with our original class size and got a Hyundai i30, which is a hatchback that looks very much like a GTi on the outside. (I did notice hatchbacks are extremely popular in Europe) After some struggles getting the car on reverse, my friend suggested he take some practice runs around the parking lot since there aren’t any cars around, and so I let him drove a few laps. Apparently this older car (33000+ km on it) was a lot lighter and had an easier shift (and has a handbrake!) so he drove around the lot with minimal amount of stalling, and next thing I know he drove towards the exit and started heading out to the big streets! And thus began the expedition back to the hotel from the train station where I lost 10 years of my life :|. With traffic around us and not sure where we’re going, we ended up heading into a shopping center because we entered the wrong lane, and I was super freaked out as cars crowded around us on those steep steep on/off ramps to the parking lot, and my friend over-gasing upon starting in 1st gear and then abruptly braking to avoid ramming into the car in front of us – not to mention the poor downshifting giving me occasional whiplashes. After a good 30 minutes of driving in rush hour traffic, we finally made it back to the hotel in one piece, at which point we obtained the key to the garage, only to have him scratch the car against the side of the garage spot when parking >.< Frustrated, I told him to get out and I ended up parking the car successfully. A note about European parking - the spots are incredibly tight, and to our amusement cars that are parked in the garage have foam padding hung to their sides to prevent scratches and dents. How someone can get into their car is beyond me. Also, throughout the course of this trip, we had to do numerous parallel parking at the sides of the streets, and we truly were fascinated by the superior parallel parking skills of the Europeans at first. The spots were incredibly narrow and there was minimal space left between cars. We would later discover and witness their parking secret of slowly backing until their wheel physically hit the curb, and then they would know to stop and readjust their parking. For super tight spots, they would even ram the car up the curb and park with one set of wheels on the curb, which was something I ended up mastering a few days later in Dijon ;). We would also witness live that cars also physically back into cars behind them before they know when to stop in parallel parking :).

After that ordeal, I was extremely exhausted, but alas it was dinner time. Half asleep at this point, I followed everyone back down the street to the metro station and we ended up somewhere at downtown Lyon again. We wanted a taste of local (rather than touristy) food at Lyon, which apparently is the gastronomical capital of the world. We ended up at a side street with lots of homey local restaurants. A lot of them were closed due to the holidays, and of the ones that were open, the first one we tried was already fully booked for the night. So we walked further down the street and tried another one – we walked into an empty restaurant except for 2 men smoking and having coffee. Apparently one of them was the owner/chef, and he told us he was having coffee with a friend and asked us to come back in 15 minutes :|.

Since the restaurant is local, the bill came out in French handwriting that we could not read, and we couldn’t guess if the bill included gratuity. The owner/chef was nice enough to explain that in France, restaurant prices including taxes (VAT) and gratuity already. Anything beyond the bill is “extra tips” :).

Despite being super tired after dinner (food coma), we subwayed back to the hotel and walked along the Rhone River (which is conveniently next to the hotel) to captures some night views before heading back to our rooms for a good night’s rest for the exciting day ahead!