J-Deux

(One last shot from the night before: the Theater, uptown from our hotel.)

When we opened the French newspaper earlier this week and saw J-Deux until Paris Hilton goes to jail, I was confused until I figured out that J is their abbreviation for the French word for day. So it's Day Two in Lyon and we hit the Museum of Tissus, or fabrics (above). That's the only picture we were allowed to take.

To get there, we walked across Presqu'ile (the peninsula bordered by the Saone and Rhone rivers) to the Rhone, then south, turning in a sweet little "place," or square. Interesting concrete work. This bench had similar qualities to the bed in my hotel room.

I took Catherine, the young woman traveling with her grandmother, with me to the Musuem du Tissus. The only photo I could take was this one, of the front entryway. I was surprised at how little captioning was done in English, remembering our trip to Shanghai some years ago where everything was captioned in both Chinese and English. But this is France, and as one of my friends put it, "They say, 'Welcome to France. Please spend your tourist dollars, but don't bug us.' " The people in the shops and on the street tend to be friendlier than the "official" French--as in museums and the dreaded Tourist Office.

They insisted that we not carry our packbacks and bags, and we obliged, heading into the cloak room to stow them. But the sign said (in French): "We are not responsible for any belongings." A verifiable Catch-22. So we loaded our pockets with our cameras, valuables, and stuffed the bags in the cubbies. (There was no mention of this anywhere in their brochures or on their website.)Of course, I found the only quilt shop in Lyon: ABCDaires and I have no idea what that means. I chatted with the owner, who buys all of her fabrics in America. She's been there for nineteen, going on twenty years, and the Tourist Office still doesn't seem to know she's around.

We lunched at Le Petit Moment, rode the Metro over to the big mall, then home again. I rested, wrote and waited for Dave. We had liked our meal so much the night before, that we went again to Le Sud for dinner, enjoying the tajine and the cloufutis (see food posts).