Sunday, January 17, 2010

I wasn't sold at first, but I'm really starting to come around to French Sundays. When I got here there were so many things I needed to get done that I found it really frustrating that everything was closed. But it's pretty easy to plan around that, and I've definitely started to appreciate the idea of a day in the week that is just your own time. You can't run errands, so it's not your fault when you don't, and even the transit is infrequent, which creates the perfect excuse and opportunity for staying home and catching up on whatever you want to do. Like blogging. :)

December was a busy month, in the best way. I wasn't sure how the holiday season would go, being far away from home, but it was filled with friends and good cheer and general loveliness.

The holiday season kicks off in Lyon around December 5th, which is the start of the Fête des Lumières, or Festival of Lights. A few centuries ago there was plague in France, and evidently the city fathers negotiated some sort of bribe with the Virgin Mary that they would light candles for her forever if only the plague didn't come to Lyon. It didn't, and over the years the tradition of putting candles in the windows on the night of December 8th has morphed into an over-the-top, all-out, four-day lighting extravaganza complete with short films projected onto buildings, laser shows, and fireworks. What seemed like all of France descends on the city (especially this year, because the first day happened to be a Saturday), and it's a huge city-wide party. People set up tables everywhere to sell spiced wine and roasted chestnuts, and all of the light shows are free, and I had a thoroughly excellent time. One of the main things is that different organizations will commission light shows tailored to a specific building, so that the projection fits it perfectly, and it will seem like the action is happening in the building with characters going in and out of doors and windows, and cool things like that. Here's a video of the show at Cathédrale Saint-Jean, which is about the design and building of the cathedral:
(It's probably better to watch this one with the sound off, since it's mostly just crowd and wind noise.)

Here's the show at the Préfecture, which was probably my favorite.


I went three days out of four, and had a ton of fun. One of the coolest displays was this little courtyard where they had set up two projectors, one at either side pointing to the opposite wall. They were just projecting moving geometric shapes, but between the two walls, they had strung up this totally crazy display of very thin wires. Some were strung straight across, and then from them hung all different curled and crumpled wires going in all directions. In the dark you couldn't see that there were wires, you could just see little squiggles of light dancing in the air as the lines and shapes hit the wires and moved across them. That's probably a really confusing explanation, but it looked really neat.

I think my favorite night was the first, because even though the crowd was way too big for the city streets here, everything was so festive and the crowd was really happy and I made some new friends - Michael brought his roommate Sonia (an assistant from Georgia who I had met before but not hung out with) and Darius, the German assistant from his school. Toward the end of the evening we also ran into a bunch of the other German assistants, all of whom speak English that puts my German to shame, and we drank cheap vin chaud and spoke three languages and had a beautiful time.

Next up: Christmas in Berlin. :)

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