A Snapshot of Lyon

We finally were able to escape the city for a few days and it was wonderful!  Our first stop was in Lyon.  This is a fairly large city as well, but had a completely different feel from Paris.  People were much friendlier too (probably because they don't have thousands of tourists running around their city everyday.)  Our first stop in Lyon was to our hotel.. which we loved. Mostly because the beds were AWESOME compared to the beds in our dorms.  We then walked to the opera house designed by Jean Nouvel which I absolutely loved.  This is an adaptive reuse project where they renovated the old opera house to accommodate more square footage and program.  The only part of the previous building kept was 3 of the 4 facades of the shell.  In order to fit the square footage needed within the same footprint, Nouvel added 3 stories below and 6 stories above the existing building.  Nouvel used 3 design strategies for this space which are:

1.) The use of the color black- it's literally everywhere
2.) Reflective surfaces
3.) Irregular forms

Such a great space... If only we would have planned to attend the ballet that night!

Instead of going to the ballet (due to cost) we decided to walk around the city and explore.  We had dinner and then Laura, Greame and I decided to hike to the top of Lyon where the Basilique de Fourviere sits on top of the hill.  It was a long, exhausting hike (mostly uphill) but completely worth it!  Along the way we crossed paths with an amazing waterfall which is shown above.  Between the waterfall, the basilica and the amazing view, I had absolutely no complaints about the walk to the top of Lyon.  Oh yeah... on the way back we saw an amazing candy store.  Don't ask me how I managed to spend 11€ on candy, but I did.  One of my inner child moments I suppos.