Annecy!

     On Sunday, Lyon 2 organized a trip to Annecy for the foreign students.  It was about an hour and a half bus ride from Lyon.  I don't have a lot to say about Annecy except that it's a really old city kind of near Geneva and it's ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS!!!!  I think the pictures speak for themselves.

Annecy sits right by one of the cleanest lakes in the world.  Some of my friends swam in it, but it was much too cold out for me.  Look at how clear the water is, though!  It looked like the ocean.

 

 The city itself is like a fairy tale.  I loved all of the old streets and buildings.  Some of the buildings date from the 16th century.  Coming from the US, it's almost hard to fathom a human structure that old.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

And what do you buy at French markets?  Cheese and bread, of course.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

The swans on the lake were pretty hillarious.  They would wade in the shallow areas and dive to eat the plants on the bottom, and when they dove their butts went completely vertical.  Needless to say, we were fascinated and continuously amused.

Before:

  

After:

  

  

  

There was kind of a fake beach near the lake where a lot of people were sunbathing in swimsuits, even though it was like 60 degrees.  

  

  

  

These are the two friends I was walking around with for most of the trip, Lisa and Jill.

  

We got really excited because we thought this little guy was a humminbird, but it turns out he was a moth.  He was still really cool to watch, though.

  

This is the interior of the Church I posted above.  This painting is from the sixteenth century.

  

  

  

  

 

Les théâtres Romains de fourvière

Last Sunday, since ALL THE STORES IN FRANCE WERE CLOSED, I decided to scrap my plans of going shopping for necessities and instead got directions (thanks, google maps!) to walk to the Roman theatre ruins, which are about 20 minutes from my apartment.  20 minutes doesn't sound like much, but it's a pretty intense 20 minutes.  The theatres are up on top of a giant hill called fourvière and I had to hike up a staircase that rivaled the steps on the Great Wall to get there.  The park with the ruins is entirely free, which is definitely a plus because it's a really neat place to just hang out for a while.

This is the main theatre.  It's the biggest in the park and can hold over 2000 people!  Imagine that in the early centuries AD.  At that time, Lyon was a major trading city and had a population of over 12,000 while Paris at the time only had 3,000 or so.

 

  

  

  

 This theatre is smaller, but it's my favorite because it has a pretty marble floor. 

  

The floor is made of different colored marble from all over the Mediterranean and dates from the 2-3 century AD.  And it's still so pretty!!!

  

The rest are pictures that I took on my way back to my apartment.

  

A view of the Saône river.

  

  

  

I no longer have funny english translations, but I found an interesting political sticker on this sign.  It says "Let's leave the Republican Matrix".  I was also invited (by a college professor) to a demonstration protesting the closing of a local movie theatre.  Oh, France.