Salut de Lyon!

Salut de France! Charlotte and I are finishing up our 8-week internships with MISTI France at the École Normale Superieure de Lyon (in the south-east of France). I'm working with aging, diet, and reproduction in C. elegans worms and Charlotte is working on embryonic closure in drosophilia (flies). When we're not working long hours in lab, we've been exploring Lyon, which is the 2nd/3rd largest city in France (it's in a battle with Marseille). And on the weekends, we've been traveling by TGV all over France! Oddly enough, every city that we've visited so far has a river or is by the sea, so here are some river photos direct from France!

First up: Lyon! Lyon has two rivers, le Rhône et la Saône, that meet at the end of the city. Charlotte and I live in an apartment about a block from the Rhône, to the right in the picture below and the left in the one below it. There's a beautiful pool under the towers with the flags, with an Olympic-sized pool and water slide! We also visited a super sketchy public pool and ended up playing water polo with the lifeguards instead of swimming laps! When it's not super hot, there's a running path that goes right by the river all along Lyon (just like running along the Charles, but with a bunch of restaurant-boats and French people wearing interesting workout clothes).

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At the top of the hill is a big basilica called Fourvière. There were fireworks there on July 14th, French Independence day, and it basically looked like Disney.

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Our first weekend, we decided that we wanted to go to the beach in the south, so we headed to Cassis, a tiny harbor known for its calenques, large rock caverns that used to be glaciers! We spent the weekend going from inlet to inlet and jumping off rocks into the Mediterranean Sea (not these rocks--that would be a stupid injury).

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We also went to Besançon, which is the sister city of Charlotteville, to visit our former exchange student and watch our high school orchestra play! The river in Besançon, le Doubs, forms a sort of buckle shape around Besançon.

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Then, we went to Paris. Here's a view of la Seine from the top of Notre-Dame:

Last weekend, we visited Grenoble, which is surrounded by le Drac and l'Isère rivers. We rode these adorable cable cars to a bastille.

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Finally, the other river in Lyon! La Saône is the only river that you can row on because le Rhône is too choppy.

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Upstream of the buildings, there is an island called Île Barbe, where barbarians lived at one point. After, there was a monastery on the island.

​This is where it is possible to row without getting killed by a boat tour.

​It turns out that there are three rowing clubs in Lyon, and, unfortunately, it took me until the end of my internship to learn that someone in my lab does crew! So on Thursday, she took us to her club, Aviron Club de Lyon Caluire. We had to wait for over an hour to go out on the water because there was a learn-to-row program for 100 adults happening. In the meantime, we learned some rowing vocab:

1. aviron = rowing

2. ramer = to row (i.e. rameuse = girl rower)

3. boat = bateau

4. tribord = starboard

5. bâbord= port

6. une rame = an oar

7. une pelle = a blade

8. au carré = on the square

9. au plat = on the feather

10. le barreur = the coxswain

After, we hopped into a four (no coxswain) and went off down the river! Charlotte sat in a pair with my friend's boyfriend, who was well over six feet tall, and I sat with my friend, who is probably six feet tall. The size difference and creaky boat made for an interesting start, but we got right back into the swing of things, and managed to row continuously for nearly two hours! Getting back on the water made me that much more excited for the fall! 

Charlotte and I have one more week in Lyon, then we're off to northern Italy (Trento, Verona, and Lake Garda) to visit friends for a week.

See you all soon on our home river! And thanks for reading this super-long post!

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Emily (and Charlotte)