Lyon: Will Miss/Won't Miss

Will Miss   (In no special order...)

• The sense of personal safety walking down the street in this city, day or night;
• Grown-ups, young and old, using kick-scooters as transportation (trottinettes);
• The glow of the Rhône at night with its illuminated bridges;
• Sylvie, my pilates instructor (--how she’d eloooongate her  “voilà” when, finally! I'd accomplish what she'd been trying to get me to do.  “Vwaaalaaaah”);
• The intermingling of ancient Roman walls and ruins with 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th century architecture;
• People of all ages and genders pulling fabric-covered wheeled shopping carts down the street;
• The multi-colored view across the Saône ~
• The omnipresent roadwork and building improvements which speak to France’s policy of investing heavily in the infrastructure during times of economic distress;
• All that delicious unpasteurized cheese;
• A church-filled country where atheism is embraced and accepted as readily as religious belief;
• A mentality that normalizes 2-hour lunch breaks;
• A town that provides bicycles for its citizens, and citizens who use them;
• Bus stops that tell you electronically exactly when the next bus--and the bus after that--is coming;
• A town with colorful painted walls on the sides of so many of its buildings.

Won’t Miss  (In no special order...)

• All that second-hand cigarette smoke;
• How carefully you have to look to avoid the dog shit on the sidewalk and in the street;
• The noise from all those infrastructure improvements;
• Trips to the laundromat;
• The frustration of being a renter with an irresponsible landlord;
• That 2-hour lunch break when commerce stops in its tracks;
• My crappy second-hand European cell phone;
• The pitch of the bleating repetitive buzzer announcing that the Metro train doors are about to close;
• Women’s fashions in store windows -- either too youthful, too bizarre, or too Ivy Shoppe*;
• Inane French TV programming;
• How milk tastes here;
• Trying to understand that rapid-fire French on recorded messages that are meant to give you instructions;
• Those tiny toilet paper rolls;
• The sticker shock on many everyday items (e.g. upwards of $33/kilo for many kinds of cheese).

 * The Ivy Shoppe:  A part of Berkeley’s past:  An older woman’s clothing, lingerie and accessory shop on College Avenue, completely unchanged in both decor and merchandise from its early 1950’s heyday.

Will Miss

•  Writing these Moments and sharing them with you.  Thanks so much for “listening”.