Day 8 - Lyon, on to Geneva

Posted by HELiX

We didn’t really intend to hang around in Lyon for long. The prices here are outrageous, and a cheap meal in this city costs no less than 10 Euros (S$21.50).

Of course, only an idiot would travel all the way to the city of gastronomy and not eat the local food. So we made our way to some random street filled with restaurants and… well, stared at the prices.

Finally, with much difficulty, we found a restaurant serving a special promotional lunch set for 9.90 Euros. And as you’d expect, we went in and got one each.

The food was, needless to say, fantastic. And the proportions made the cost worth it — came with a plate full of salad first, then the main course with (what else) French fries and finally a sweet dessert. But at over S$20, it was one hell of a price to pay for brunch.

There wasn’t much to see in Lyon. We crossed River Rhone and River Saone to visit the historical side of Lyon, Viex Lyon, where… uhm, I only got to see nice buildings like St George’s Church and St Jean Cathedral. And then we parked the car and went up a hill to Basilique de Fourviere, which is, once again a church. These are the few beautiful places in Lyon, which makes me wonder why they save all the grand architectures for the holy sites.

The view from Fourviere was absoutely fantastic. It offers a full panoramic view of the city. At the point, you’ll look around and wonder, Where The Hell Are All the Skyscrapers?!

That view represents about one-third of the city because I’m too lazy to stitch up a panorama. There seems to be only one tall building in Lyon, which sticks out really ugly among the short and flat landscape.

At 30km away, I saw my first ever nuclear power station. See it?

Perhaps what Lyon is also famous for is the Croix Rousse, which I have no bloody idea what that is. Together with some parts of Viex Lyon, they form a UNESCO World Heritage Site which sounds somewhat impressive. So we planned a visit to Croix Rousse anyway, guided by GPS on my phone and my brother’s.

Apparently, these areas are famous for the narrow intra-building building pavements and streets and whatnot that silk workers and traders used in the past. Purpose? So that when it rained, everyone can easily run into a building and move around from workshop to workshop quickly without getting the rain on the silk and hence spoiling it. These famed cobbled streets are also where movies like The Three Musketeers were filmed at.

We got to Croix Rousse’s metro station, and circled it a bit trying to find anything that seemed impressive, but gave up eventually.

The traffic system in Lyon can really piss you off. Like seriously.

Surely they are traffic lights, but it seems, only drivers obey them. Pedestrians can cross any way they like, at any time, whether or not it’s green or red man. Countless of times we nearly ran down a person because it was green light for cars and red man for pedestrians but some idiot crossed anyway. It’s like the whole city is filled with traffic light for cars, but zebra crossings for pedestrians. Takes some time to get used to.

Also, the entire city is laid out with narrow one-way streets. Many times we turned into a street with the direction of traffic flow against us, and we started panicking.

Although we didn’t manage to find the Croix Rousse, or perhaps we passed by it without noticing, we were more than happy to leave and get back on the highways than anything.

In Lyon, don’t get yourself a car.

We headed out north-east on highway A42 towards Geneva on a 2-hour long journey. However, because we didn’t have any Swiss Franc and were warned that Switzerland is even more expensive that the already-expensive Lyon, we drove to the outskirts of Geneva, into this town called Archamps. It’s still within the French border and is only 20 minutes from Geneva. Got a room in a hotel there for the night because it’s likely to be cheaper.

We’ll cross into Geneva tomorrow. Already at the boundary of France-Switzerland, I can see Switzerland-like scenery with all the mountains and rivers. BEAUTIFUUUUL.

Summary of the Day:
Current location - Archamp, France
Distance drove today - 151.5 km
Total distance drove - 1084.5 km

Comments(0) 3:50 AM 6 June 2008

Day 7 - Lyon

Posted by HELiX

Spent about three or four hours on the French highways today, and made it to Lyon at about 3.30pm.

Lyon’s the second largest city in France, only behind Paris. However, unlike Paris which is decorated with all the world-renowned landmarks, Lyon’s not really the city who welcomes tourists.

First off, we’re only here to drop off my sister who’s on an immersion programme to a French family here in Lyon for a month. We left her at the Part-Dieu Railway Station where she met up with other NUS undergraduates involved and the French families taking them up.

From here, our family size has dropped to four, down from six. My brother is in Munich for an entire semester for an exchange programme (another two months to go), and my sister will be living with the family for a month.

That should save on petrol costs.

Anyway, back to Lyon. The city’s not that tourist-friendly at all. The people here are unable to say a proper logical sentence of English at all, which is a big contrast from Munich, where everyone can effectively converse in both English and German.

I’m having a hard time picking up French although it’s a language I tried self-learning at Primary 5 when was I bored and not playing Neopets.

There are also not much tourist attractions over here in Lyon. Or perhaps they don’t make an effort to advertise their city. All the tourist information stuff are in French, and I can only understand that they want me to pay a lot of money for them to take me around Lyon.

Lyon’s actually the City of Gastronomy, but so far I’ve only eaten fast food restaurants including McDonald’s. Not my choice — the food here is extremely expensive, perhaps even worse than London. A McDonald’s meal is priced roughly about the same as Singapore in terms of the figure at almost 6 Euros… but y’know, it converts into S$13 for a normal, non-upsized McDonald’s meal.

Our first attempt at order food in Lyon (at McDonald’s) turned out to be a complete disaster. We ended up with a happy meal in our tray, somehow.

Tomorrow we’ll be driving around Lyon a bit more just to see what little they have to offer for sightseeing, before we’ll be back on the highways again. This time, we’re headed north-west towards Switzerland. We intend to visit Geneva, but weather forecasts predict bad weather, so maybe we’ll just drive through and stop somewhere else.

We’ve been to most parts of Europe back in 1998 on our previous trip, since we covered England, Scotland, France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy and even the Netherlands. I don’t remember much since I was eight, but right now the ultimately aim is to go very, very far north to Copenhagen in Denmark since it’s somewhere we haven’t been to.

Distance covered for today… 410 km.

Hopefully, there’s free internet in the next hotel/motel we’re staying at. It’s rare on these European highways, I’m telling ya.

Comments(0) 7:54 AM 6 June 2008

Day 6 - Towards Lyon

Posted by HELiX

Last day in Munich. We didn’t exactly do much other than some last minute shopping.

It was well into the afternoon by the time we made our way to the airport to pick up the car we rented from Europcar.

It’s a 5-seater Renault. Too small for the six of us, so we went back and requested for a bigger car. We’d pay more if we had to.

Turns out that all their cars are fully sold out, so the six of us had to squeeze ourselves into the five seats. That wasn’t so much of the problem. We had bigger troubles trying to fit all our 5 luggages into the boot.

We did so anyway, because people do the impossible when they don’t have a damn choice.

The car took some time for my Dad, a full-time family chauffeur for over ten years, to get used to. Left-seat driving, staying on the right-hand lane unless overtaking, manual gear changing, and a car instruction manual in German.

We were on the German highways by 5pm. Supposed to head down south-west to Lyon, but that involves cutting through Switzerland, which my Dad didn’t want because going through too many borders can be troublesome.

So we took the highway to Munich city, turned off and headed north-west towards Northern France. From there, we then head down south along the French highway to Lyon.

We traveled from Munich, up north-west towards Ulm, Stuttgart, Pforzheim and Karlsruhe. Then proceeded south-west towards Baden-Baden, Freiburg and finally crossing into France where Mulhouse is.

By then it was 10.30pm. We spent about 5 hours or so on the roads, but it wasn’t so bad since the sky here darkens completely only at 10pm.

We were also halfway through the journey to Lyon, and had decided to stop for the day (night?) at Mulhouse for refuelling and check into a motel.

Mulhouse is this mid-size town at the edge of France. It lies merely kilometres away from Switzerland, and in Europe, seems like there isn’t a need to go through border control and immigration checkpoints when passing into France. I wanted the France immigration on my passport :(

We arrived at almost 11pm, and tried driving around Mulhouse in search of a petrol station. By then, we had just one tiny bar left on the petrol indicator (out of eight, I think), and it was really worrying. Drove around, found one — closed. Drove around a bit more, found another — closed. By then, we realised that almost the entire town was asleep and no shops and businesses were open. Not even the petrol stations, since they don’t operate 24/7.

After driving past another one or two more closed petrol stations, and in doing so eating up some of whatever we left of that one tiny bar of petrol left, we decided to hit the highway again because those petrol stations would be still open for sure.

It was a really silly thing to do, going back onto the highway with less than a bar of petrol left, but we just hoped and drove on. We took the wrong direction, ended up heading back north-east towards Germany, crossed back into Germany and finally found an Esso open.

By then, it was 11-plus.

There weren’t any open motels in that area, and the few that we found were mysteriously locked and unmanned. So… at almost 12am, we went back onto the highway. Again. And crossed back into France. Again.

The plan was to find a motel along the highway route to Lyon, but after driving for some distance that seemed unlikely.

Finally, we gave up and drove into another French town, Belfort. It wasn’t exactly the smartest thing to do since the previous town we were at, Mulhouse, was completely closed and asleep.

I won’t bore you with the process of driving around aimlessly to find a motel, but we did. Wasn’t exactly a motel or hotel, but a hostel. Works for us, so we didn’t mind.

Checked in and immediately fell asleep — because they didn’t have free internet.

Summary of the Day
Started driving: About 5pm
Stopped driving: About 1.30am
Distance covered: About 580 km

Comments(0) 6:43 AM 6 June 2008

Day 5 - Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein

Posted by HELiX

Finding a free wireless hotspot in Munich can be such a drag. I had to walk around for hours, with my laptop and PDA phone, furiously refreshing the network list for any unsecured connection. Even fast food restaurants and famed WiFi placed like Starbucks don’t provide.

From now, I don’t think it’s possible to get online daily. Perhaps once every few days. Or few weeks. I don’t know. But the lack of a Wireless@Europe is really getting to me.

Today’s events weren’t much. We took a two-hour long train ride from Munich to the Bavarian countryside, to this town called Schwangau.

The whole point was just to view two castles in build in the 19th century by the Kings of Bavaria. They span between King Maximilian, King Ludwig I and King Ludwing II. There’s really nothing much to say.

These castles are quite old, yes, but not old enough to be impressive. Being under two centuries old only, much of the original royal furnishing and stuff are perserved and only that bit is worth seeing.

Much of my day was spent walking around, from castle to castle, covering over three hours of walking on inclined slopes. That bit sucked.

The story goes that one of the castles, Hohenschwangau, was built in the 12th century by Schwangau knights, but was destroyed by successive wars. Napolean had a share too. And in the early 19th century, the King-to-be Maximilian came across the ruins, bought over it and decided to rebuild it according to its original plans.

And then he decided to use it as a getaway summer vacation residence. Convenient!

Soon, his son (Crown Prince Ludwig) grew tired of the place and spent more state funds into building a new castle. That would be the Neuschwanstein. And he dumped the Hohenschwangau to his Dad.

It was never completed. Only 1/3 of the rooms were furnished, and he could only spent 172 days in it before passing on.

Of course democracy came into effect and the royal family lost its power. It led to the King committing suicide, his successor turning insane, and finally monarchy completely disappearing from Bavaria.

Only that much is interesting.

Other experiences in Munich so far?

Well, I was at the Munich city centre the other day, and bumped into some SCGS girls. Singaporeans really stand out overseas.

Not being able to read and understand a language is a truly inconvenient thing. I walked into a restaurant, and asked for the washroom. Was pointed to the way upstairs, where I had to ask again because I couldn’t make sense of the signs. Found the washroom, and couldn’t decipher the difference between ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’ until I looked into both. Ugh.

We’ll be leaving Munich tomorrow for Lyon in France. My Dad has rented a car, so we’ll be collecting it and hitting the roads from there. No more trains!

Also, from there, we’ll probably just check into any motel we find on the way when it turns dark. Likely to be some in some random town in the middle of nowhere. We plan to cover about 400km a day.

On the downside, finding an internet connection may become rarity once we hit the roads. Definitely no wireless access on the European highways, and I doubt there’ll be any in the small motels along the way.

Let’s just hope. Mmm hmm.

Comments(0) 6:39 AM 6 June 2008