Lyon, Day II

On Sunday, we took the tram to the Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation and took a breakfast stop at a little pastry shop on the corner. The museum was all about famous people in the French Resistance during WWII, especially influential women who risked social criticism and death threats to help Jews and restore many of the lost cultural items of the country. One woman in particular re-captured much of the artwork taken by Hitler; she moved to Germany to become a spy and kept in contact with many museum cultivators who were constantly recuperating missing artifacts.

For lunch, we went to Pizza Pai, a “buffet” type restaurant that had great pizza and an amusing ambiance similar to American restaurants. The goal was to whet our indulgence for Americanized international food, or maybe it was simply that we didn't want to pay that much for lunch. I was constantly surprised that in all of the restaurants in Lyon, they had water sitting on the table when you got there or it was automatically brought out when you arrived. I wish they gave free water in Switzerland….

We spent the last few hours in the city at the fine arts museum – which had a temporary Picasso and Matisse exhibit – and the museum of miniatures and movie props. The fine arts museum was swarming with locals wanting to see the famous Fauvist and Cubist paintings. We managed to access the entrance from the inside through a courtyard, where we just missed a line that stretched from the door to the end of the block. Instead of having to wait in line to pay for our tickets, we again flashed our city cards and they gave us our free tickets. The exhibit was very crowded, and I was constantly worried about women with their oversized purses because they always seemed to stand dangerously close to the paintings. I’m surprised they weren’t more closely monitored, considering their significance in art history.



There was an enormous fountain outside the museum that was beautiful and majestic. This was the Bartholdi Fountain built in the late 1800s, depicting a woman who controls the four rivers of France (symbolized by the four horses).



We took our last hour to tour the museum of miniatures, where they had costumes, masks, and stand-ins from famous shows and movies like Star Wars, Men in Black II, V for Vendetta, Terminator, The X-Files, and Planet of the Apes. Some of the props were pretty gruesome with blood and guts and rotting monkeys and such. It was really interesting, however, how they created such realistic props for horror movies. We also saw some amazing origami and incredibly small paper cutting and sculptures.

We took the 6pm TGV back to Geneva and had another late dinner at about 10pm.