France: Sport en Lyon

One of the most interesting cultural experiences I’ve had so far in Lyon was watching France play in the final of the Rugby World Cup.  Ironically, it was in a Scottish Pub, and they were playing “les anglo-saxons” New Zealand All-Blacks (this is a very commonly used term for anyone who's first language is English, but usually means American or British). It was really cool when everyone started singing  the national anthem, La Marseillaise, when France scored a try. It was a very good game to watch (and I don’t even follow rugby!), with the All Blacks only edging out “Les Bleus” by 1 point.   Everyone was very proud how their team played, and as this was really New Zealand's game to lose, they did quite well.

The standing-room only crowed at The Wallace.  The are lots of Irish and Scottish pubs here, very à la mode.  Luckily we showed up 2 hours before kick off to snag a table.  What I didn't expect was that only a few people were wearing jerseys (eg. the guys with the tricolour wigs) - quite different than national sporting events back home.

The whole bar singing La Marseillaise (the French national anthem) at the start of the game.

"Allez les bleus!", the national cheer.  The most common thing people said to cheer on their team during the game was "allez!" or go! in English.  

Another rendition of "allez les bleus", after a particularly good play.

Soccer ("le foot") and rugby are the most popular sports in France, although tennis and handball are also quite commonly played, and lots of people ski (especially since Lyon is only an hour or so from the Alps).  I was surprise to discover that CPE started an American Football team this year. This is not a very common sport in France.  

In November, I went to see a Champions League match with about 15 other exchange students.  We bought our tickets 2 months in advance, 35 € for what turned out to be pretty decent seats.  We didn't' use the seats much, as soon as the game started everyone stood on them to get a better view.  If everyone was sitting we could all have the same view while being more comfortable...   

This is the top league in Europe, with only the best 1-3 teams from each country.  Olympique Lyon is one of the 3 teams representing France (the others are Lille and Olympique Marseille - very creative names!), and in the past 10 years they have made it to the semi-finals several times and are multiple national champions.  They play about 2 Champions League games a month, and also play in the top French League.  

Waiting for the game to start, with Jan (Germany), Néstor (Catalonia / Spain), Julia (Germany), Stefan (Germany), and Daiane (Brazil).

With Julia (Germany), with our Olympique Lyonnais scarves.  There are ones just for the team and some especially for the match, with both teams and the date.

Before you can enter the stadium, you get a pat-down by a security guard and they check your purse.  These security measures, as well as the total lack of beer in the stadium, are in place to try and reduce hooliganism. I didn't realize it was such a big issue - I mean, NHL games are pretty peaceful and thats with lots of people having 2-3 beers a game.  However, when the hooligans started throwing flare guns and the police in riot gear had to be called in, it made sense!  

Lyon was playing Ajax Amsterdam, who were slightly ahead in their pool (which also includes Real Madrid and Dinamo Zagreb).  The Amsterdam fans, who had spent all day on a bus to get there, had their own section, separated from the Lyon fans by two fences and a no-man's land.  That didn't stop them from climbing the fences and mouthing off at the Lyon fans!  We were sitting in a fairly quiet section, or so we thought until the Ajax fans nearby started making rude gestures at the Lyon fans and the Lyonnais answered back.  The Lyon hooligans were seated across the stadium, as far away as possible from the Dutch fans. Along the length of the stadium were the more expensive club seats.  

The pitch at Stade de Gerland, before the game.

"O L " for Olympique Lyon, at the start of the game.  The team's colours are blue and red.

Things didn't get really out of hand (apparently this was average for a football match), although twice a Dutch flare caused smoke to cover the playing field, so for a few minutes we couldn't see what was happening in the game.

Smoke from a flare thrown by the Ajax hooligans.  The game didn't stop, although this must certainly have made things more challenging for the players.

Another flare.

Ajax hooligans in the distance.  Check out the flare on the left hand side.

The match was a draw, 0-0.  It was a lot of fun, but it would have been nice to see a goal, and Lyon had several good chances towards the end.  Ajax just needed to draw to be basically guaranteed a spot in the playoffs, as the second place team behind the uncatchable Real Madrid.   Lyon needed to beat them to get this spot - their only remaining chance after the game was for Ajax to lose to Madrid and for Lyon to score 7 goals more than Ajax against Zagreb.  Incredibly, thats what happened a few weeks later! Lyon beat Zagreb 7-1, tying the record for most goals ever scored in a Champion's league match.  Lyon maintains their record of making it to the playoffs every year since '02/03.  I'm really looking forward to watching the playoffs, which start in a few weeks.

"Tout ce qui ne sautent pas sont pas Lyonnais" (Anyone not jumping is not Lyonnais).  

At the front of our section were two guys on a raised platform with a microphone, there to lead the cheers.  They were actually pretty annoying, and couldn't sing worth a dime.  I did like the giant flags at the front of our section.

"Lyonnais"

France: Wandering in Lyon / Villeurbanne

Here are some photos from wandering around Lyon and Villeurbanne, the suburb where I live.  It's not really a suburb per se, you don't notice when you leave Lyon for Villeurbanne except that the buildings are newer (it was built in the 60s).  It's not as nice as Lyon, so usually when we go out we head to Vieux Lyon or Hôtel de Ville, the trendier areas.  

I'm about a 10 minute walk to CPE Lyon, on the other side of the Doua campus.  The campus is made up of several schools and universities, CPE is fairly small and occupies 2 buildings.  I'm about a 20 minute walk from Parc Tête d'Or, a largee park on the Rhône that even has an outdoor zoo. Interesting fact: my residence is down the street from a military cemetery.  

One of the nicer streets in Villeurbanne.

My neighbourhood is kind of sketchy... this building around the corner is slated for demolition.  

Apartment building near my residence - Santa and his elves seem to have found a solution to the no-chimney problem!

View out my window (you can't see the roof of the other residence building in this photo).

One of the most interesting things I've learned about Lyon is that this was were movies were invented, by the Lumière brothers in 1895.  Their house and factory where they made the first motion pictures have been converted into a museum and movie theatre, where they show only classic films.  Every year they have a classic film festival, and actors like Georges Depardieu and Clint Eastwood watch the screening side by side with ordinary Lyonnais - it's very low key.  I went to see a Frank Capra movie, Broadway Bill, made in 1934.  It was really quite something to take in a black and white in the factory where movies were invented!

The art deco Lumière house.

Some pictures of Vieux-Lyon at night:

View of the city from the Croix-Rousse hill.

Somewhere in Lyon...

France: Les soirées à Lyon

On the weekends, the international students from CPE Lyon, plus a few others that live in the same residence that go to different schools, get together to cook or head out to Vieux Lyon for a few drinks.  Unfortunately, none of the residences have common rooms, so we usually end up all cramming in to one person's room.  Night life here is more laid-back than in Canada, with more of an emphasis on bars with a dance floor than clubs.  Interestingly, Irish and Scottish pubs are very à la mode in Lyon,  and one of the bars we’ve been to a few times is Australian-themed.  Most places are found near l’Hôtel de Ville or in Vieux Lyon. Quite a different neighborhood than the 10th Avenue spots in Calgary.  It’s always a bit of a shock when you leave and realise you’re walking through a medieval neighborhood! There are also many cafés all over the city, many of which feel more like a bar than a Starbucks and serve both alcohol and coffee.  

Place des Terreaux.  Hôtel de Ville is the building on the left.

Place Bellcour at night.

On the Pont Bonaparte over the Saone, with Vieux Lyon, Cathédrale St-Jean and la Fourvière in the background.

Bridge over the Saone.

The Rhône.

With Jan (Germany) and Steven (Belgium) in La Caverne, a really cool bar in the cellar of a Renaissance-era building in Vieux Lyon.

Opéra de Lyon.

Celebrating the "Beaujolais Nouveau" wine festival in residence with Marc and Néstor from Catalonia (Spain).

Outside the James Joyce Irish pub in Vieux Lyon.  

International Students night at the Boston pub (yet another Irish bar), with Piotr (Poland).

In early December, we went to the Fouvière hill, which overlooks the whole city, for some Glühwein, or German mulled wine.  It's generally sold from a large pot over a kerosene heater, and is made of red wine mixed with rum or vodka, cinnamon and other spices, and sometimes sliced apples or oranges.  It tastes like Christmas cake and is especially nice on cold winter evenings like this one.

Enjoying our Glühwein in front of the Fourvière Basilica, with Camila (Brazil) and Julia (Germany).

Fouvière Basilica.

View of Lyon from the Fouvière Hill.  You can see both the Saône and Rhône rivers, Place Bellecour, and Cathédrale St-Jean.

Girls night!  On Fridays some of the CPE girls get together to cook and try out some locals wines.  My favourite was when we made crêpe: ham and emmental for dinner and nutella for dessert.

With Julia (Germany), Elaine, Daiane and Camila (Brazil).

In late November some of us went to the annual CPE Gala, their equivalent of a graduation party.  It's nice to have something to dress up for every once in a while!

With Stefan (Germany), Victor and Néstor (Catalonia, Spain).

In October I applied for the Jeunes-Ambassadeurs program, a cultural, industrial, economic and professional immersion program that gives you a closer look at life and industry in Lyon.  The first meeting was in the beautiful Hôtel du Région.

Hôtel du Région.

Chambre de Commerce de Lyon, where we had our second meeting.

One aspect of the program is you get paired up with a “coach”, someone experienced in the industry of the region.  Lyon is a major pharmaceutical research and industrial centre, and I was luckily paired up with a coach from one of the largest vaccine manufacturers in the world, Sanofi Pasteur.  I’m really interested in pharmaceutical engineering, which is also a component of the biomedical engineering curriculum, so I’m really looking forward to learning more about this aspect of Lyon industry.  I’ve signed up for a filed trip organised by the program to one of their factories in a few weeks – really looking forward to it!

The program is also great for meeting other students.  There are meetings with all of the students about once a month where we learn a bit about Lyon culture and industry, with a cocktail reception afterwards.

At the Hôtel du Région with Marco (Germany), another CPE student.

France: Lyon Student Life

Student life in Lyon is quite a bit different than at Queen’s.  People don’t seem to take school as seriously as they do in Kingston, and classes and exams so far have been less intense.  The benefit of this and the pass-fail system at Queen's for students on exchange is that you don’t have to be entirely focused on coursework, so you have more opportunities for cultural experiences and getting to know students from around the world. 

I’m finding it fairly easy to follow along in class, but depending on the professor’s accent I sometimes have trouble.  The hardest is slang – they don’t teach you Lyonnais slang in French class.   Reading is the easiest, but I think this is probably true with any language.  Part of the reason I wanted to do my exchange in France was that I could practice my French.  Although I did 13 years for French Immersion (almost all my classes in French) from Kindergarten to Grade 12 and have a Bilingual High School Diploma, I haven't had many opportunities to use it since high school. I'm very grateful for this chance to put it to good use!

The way courses are organised is also very different here.  The schedule is different every week, and you only find out what classes you will have the Friday before.  This makes it pretty difficult to make any kind of plans!  The class sizes are pretty small for the higher levels, around 25 students.  In France, to get into engineering school, or "École Supérieur" (which is distinct from regular univeristies), you have to study in a Prépa ( École Préparatoire) for 2 years after high school, or go to a normal university in a science program for 2 years to prepare for the admission exams.  After that you have 3 years at the engineering university, which gives you a “Bac + 5”, which the equivalent of a master’s degree.  However, most of the courses I need to substitute for my 3^rd year Queen’s courses are in what would be in France 4^th year level or Master’s level courses.  There is no set exam period,  so for this semester I have them from November until the end of January.  Spring semester goes until the end of June.  Many exams are open book.  I had an exam recently on Gene Chips, where I was asked to summarize the given paper on a gene chip technique (which was conveniently in English), and answer a few questions that were straight out of the paper.  You could have aced the exam without ever having been to class!  I’m a little anxious about some of the other ones coming up, but overall I’ve found the workload is much less than in Canada.  We almost never have assignments and I only have 5 labs this semester.  

Warning: minor rant about residence ahead! My residence room makes me wish for the old Leggett days, 4 flights of stairs (no elevator!), no common room, and the worst internet ever! Apparantly they haven’t updated the system since they installed it 5-6 years ago, when there was only a small fraction of students that had computers in their room.  Now everybody has laptops, and the internet is so slow no I can’t even load my gmail account most days! On top of that, my building (unlike all the others) doesn’t have wifi even though we pay the same monthly rate as the ones that do, so I had to go out and get myself an ethernet cable.  For the first two weeks there was no internet at all, and my electronic key to get into the residence complex and into my building didn’t work and the machine to fix it was broken.  This meant I couldn’t leave my building without somebody else or risk being locked out!  What I do like about my room is the big window and the relatively new cabinets.

Thankfully they have an Ikea in Lyon, which made it fairly easy to get set up.  I bought the same duvet cover I have in Kingston, a little touch of home!  

My residence room.  

Overall, life in France is quite different than back home, with lots of pleasant surprises and a few unpleasant ones (like the incredibly complicated residency permit process).  I especially like how people here put an emphasis on enjoying life, and not just working all the time.  It’s made me realise that people really work a lot back home!  For example, kids here have no school on Wednesdays until they’re about 11, and the minimum number of weeks of vacation per year is 5 weeks!  I certainly miss how efficient things are back home, and a lot less waiting in line, which seems to be very common.  You wait for hours at the bank, the prefecture, the cell phone company, the school office, the residence office... only to find out they don't have what you need.  Although I’m really looking forward to going home for Christmas, I’m really glad I have the opportunity to expeirience life in France.

France: Gastronomie de Lyon

One of my favorite parts of exchange so far has been making friends from so many places.  There are exchange students at CPE Lyon from Germany, Brasil, Belgium, Poland, Spain, and Argentina.  When we get together there are up to 7 languages flying around! For most people, it is easiest to communicate in English.  It’s kind of a drawback I think, because when were speaking English all the time my French isn’t improving as fast as I think it could.  I’m also the only anglophone I’ve met so far from my school.

Feeling a bit homesick around Thanksgiving, I organised a Canadian Thanksgiving dinner with the international students.  This was a ton of fun!  However, this is also when I realised that pretty much everything in the grocery stores is French.  I was especially stunned to see Campbell’s Soup and peanut butter in the foreign food aisle!

The foreign food aisle - Campbell's soup.

Maple syrup (imported from Canada) and peanut butter in the foreign food aisle.

Found this in the tea section!  Tastes like apples and maple syrup.

Thanksgiving dinner was a lot of fun, although due to the lack of suitable ingredients at the grocery store we ended up using pre-cooked chickens instead of turkey, a slice of pumpkin I baked with brown sugar on it in a toaster over and an apple pie instead of pumpkin pie, and “rasperry sauce” made with boiled rasberries instead of cranberries.   That’s pretty much the 3 main ingredients required for Thanksgiving dinner out of the picture, although we still had a lot of fun.

Cooking was a bit of a challenge – our kitchen doesn’t have an oven, so we borrowed a friend’s toaster oven, and in the absence of a potato masher used an empty wine bottle to smash the potatoes!

Mashing potatoes with an empty wine bottle, in the absence of a potato smasher.

Thanksgiving dinner.

Thanksgiving - hard to fit all these people in our tiny kitchen.

Since Thanksgiving the international students have also organised a German food night, a Brasilian night and a Spanish night.

Brazilian Fejoada - rice, beans and oranges.

Spanish paella.

Enjoying Spanish paella and sangria with Steven (Belgium), Tomás (Brazil) and Jan (Germany).

I also had a lot of fun cooking French toast and pancakes with the Catalán (area of Spain that includes Barcelona – they have their own language) and Brasilian students on my floor.  Nobody else had ever heard of it!

Banana pancakes.

One of the great things about France is that  there are so many types of cheese and for about 25% of what you would pay back home.  Same goes for wine, plus they conveniently sell it in the grocery store (so much better than the trek to the LCBO).  One of my favorite things to eat here is cheese on a fresh baguette or loaf of bread.  Conveniently, there are bakeries everywhere.

In Vieux Lyon, the main tourist area of the city, there are lots of crêpe stands.  My favourite is the nutella crêpe, but I have also made them for dinner with cheese and ham.  In the winter there are also lots of people selling Vin Chaud (mulled wine), sometimes even out of a grocery cart!  They sell it out of a thermos or from a pot over a kerosene stove.  It still amazes me that it's completely legal!  

Crêpe stand. A great snack while wandering the city.

Lyon is known as the undisputed gastronomical capital of France, which makes it one of the culinary capitals of the world!  Besides the world-famous chefs, Lyon is well known for its "bouchons", small restaurants that are everywhere in Vieux Lyon.  One of the foreign students was going back home to Brasil, so we all went out to a bouchon to enjoy some typical Lyonnais cuisine.

 

My appetizer - Salade Lyonnaise.  Lettuce, bacon and a poached egg. 

Entree:  I can't remember exactly what this is called but it has Lyonnais sausage in it.  Desert was a chocolate mousse.

My friend ordered tripe, a.k.a. stomach!! Not exactly my cup of tea...

Rhône-Alpes (the Lyon region) is well known for it's wine, including Côtes-du-Rhône and Chateauneuf-du-Pape.  Nearby is the Beaujolais wine region, and every November there is a festival in Lyon called "Beaujolais Nouveau", where you drink wine that has only been bottled for a month.  It's a lot of fun to watch them roll the barrels of wine through the old streets but as for the wine it's not so good!

"Girls Night" with Julia (Germany), Elaine, Daiane and Camila (Brazil).  Salad and Côtes-du-Rhône.