Lyon Fete de Lumiere

The first display...a little dissapointing
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On Sunday Carina, Kiki, Valerie, Wolfram and I went to Lyon for the light festival.  It's also called St. Catherine's day...I guess it's a celebration.  Kind of a big thing because it happens every year.  We decided to go on Sunday because it is supposed to be raining the whole rest of the weekend.

Once we go to Lyon (it was freeeeezing by the way) we met up with our friend Ronny and his girlfriend Nicola.  How it works is that you get a type of map, on the map there are numbers of certain light shows that you can go and see.  I was thinking that it would be kind of like a laser light show or something like that...It was not that at all.

It was so cool! It really looked like a statue had a pink face and a blue body with yellow feet.

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Our first exhibit was extremely dissapointing...it was in front of the Hotel de Ville and basically it was 9 huge balls suspended in the air and there was music playing and some lights shown on them.  Not very impressive.  The Hotel de Ville can be found in any city in France, usually big cities, and it is where the mayor lives.  I imagine that the mayor has a pretty nice shack up in the Hotel de Ville with the birds eye view of everything.  Anyways, we all moved en masse to the next place which was near the bridge over looking the basilique.  That was really interesting because it had a kind of fairy tale explaining some of the history of the Basilique and the princess...I am not positive of everything because it was in French but I think I got the jist of it.

Opera
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We went on to get some vin chaud (hot wine) from a vendor and of course you can't have vin chaud without a crepe!  We walked around to another light show that was on the back of the Opera.  That one was really great (genial!!) and it had really interesting lights in the shape of bumblebees and insects and butterflies (papillon en francias) and there was really nice music and they had some sort of system that sprayed out an earthy flowery scent.  It was a little overpowering, but it was cool how they tried to put it all together with as many senses as possible.

Basilique
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We decided to go get something to eat, otherwise we would be way to hungry but everything was way too crowded.  But we finally came across a restaurant called Eaton Rock Cafe which was an "American restaurant".  Supringly enough it was really really good.  I got fajitas and so did Kiki and Valerie and the guys got burgers.  It did take forever for us to get our food (45 minutes!!!) but then we hurried up and went to the Notre-Dame church to see another light show.  This one was really interesting, it had more history of Lyon which was kind of cool to see all the people in history displayed on a building.

Dinner!
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Our next to last exhibit was probably the worst one ever and it was a tourist trap.  It was in a bad part of town and basically it was a few tree's with paper mache igloos (about the size of a shoebox) tied to the branches...that was it.  What kind of display is that?!

We did end up at the best place last, which was in front of the Theatre.  The pictures that I have were pretty good of the lights.  The lights were cast on the statues and monuments so that it looked like they were painted.  It was so cool!  It really looked like a statue had a pink face and a blue body with yellow feet.

Theatre...best by far!
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Around 10 or so we left because we were all exhausted and it was freezing outside.