After a pleasant breakfast in the hotel, I set off again around the Old Town to take some pictures of sights I found last night but couldn’t take because it was dark.  I then set off as planned to the square at Les Terreaux. The statue of the horses is still very impressive, and every time I see it, I just have to take a  few more pictures.  I walked down the main thoroughfare from there all the way to the Gare Pérrache, taking many photographs, but finding nothing that I wanted to buy and getting increasingly fed up with the beggars who constantly accost everyone.  I found the easiest thing was to just talk to them in a flood of fast English.  Most of them shrugged and gave up at that.  (Some of course were more persistent, so they got a flood of fast French!)

I stopped for a Perrier near the station, and then walked back again, along the rue Victor Hugo.  Once again, lots of nice statues, but the shops were either high fashion, or antiques or the like and I saw nothing much to hold my attention.  It started to spit with rain during the journey, but it only lasted a few minutes. When I got back to Les Terraux, the sun was out again, so I stopped to have a Perrier in one of the cafés  by the fountain (3 €! - £2.25 for a glass of water!!) and of course I took some more photographs of the horses.  One of them really pleased me, (see below). It was a picture of two people sitting in the sun on the wall round the fountain, looking calm and relaxed, while just behind them, a vision from hell was crashing through from another dimension.  The horses are depicted with so much movement and tension that it is impossible to see them as static and the final photograph looks like something from a horror film.  

The sky was turning a bit black again, so I crossed straight back over the river and it was almost a relief to be back in “real Lyon” again.  I stopped for a salade Lyonnaise and a steak frites near the funiculaire station and then made a slow walk back to the hotel, where I did the first stages of getting packed.  

A favourite pastime in this part of France is painting trompe-l’oeil murals on the blank walls of buidings, and Lyon abounds with excellent examples.  One of my favourites was to be found on a building by the river, where they had created an entire  bookshop on the ground floor, and then placed books and famous literary quotes on the upper floors. You really had to look hard to realise that the bookshop wasn’t real.  Far better than just painting the wall white like we probably would in England.  A bit of style and a bit of intelligent humour.  Very French!

When I went back out, it was raining quite heavily and I ducked into a café and had a coffee while it abated.  I then went back to the hotel for an umbrella and tried again.  This time of course it stayed dry, so I just walked around until dinner time, when I chose a Menu Fraîcheur at a little bistrot in a side street.  It was supposed to be a “light meal”, just a salad and a dessert, but they brought me the biggest salade Lyonnaise I had ever seen (three eggs on top and a mountain of bacon and croutons).  I actually left some!  

During the meal I had a lovely chat with the couple on the next table.  He was a long-distance lorry driver and had visited my part of England, although he spoke very little English and his wife spoke none.  We talked about all manner of things from holidays to politics, and it was a very nice way to round off the holiday.  The time flew by and it was 11pm before I finished my coffee and went back to the hotel to do some more packing and get ready for the morning.  I will have to be up very early, as I have to release my car from the car park, bring it to the hotel, load up my cases, and then find the way out of Lyon and off to St Exupéry Airport – hopefully arriving just after 10am.  The possibilities for problems are endless and I shall breathe a sigh of relief when the car is back and the case is handed over to British Airways.

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