Lyon Block Week Field Course (and gong show)

Well, the course itself turned out to be a bit of a bust. In the past, it has been a showcase of a city with attention to aspects relating to all of the disciplines within the faculty of environmental design**. This year, it was a series of disjointed and unrelated tours (some interesting, others not) that did not really have much to offer. Lyon is a beautiful old city, I had a great time, and I gained a credit out of it… but most of what I learned wasn’t presented as part of the course.

We stayed in a motel-style complex at an engineering school (called ENTPE) located in a suburb of Lyon called Vaux au Velin. The suburb was typically suburbanish with larger roads and large complex/campus-style development whose internal urban design did not at all work with that of the street. For a pedestrian there were many dead ends and no indication of where paths lead. For cars, the driving experience was purely functional: A to B. You exited from one campus and went to another. The campuses didn’t feel connected to eachother, and didn’t even share a common theme. The suburb felt very disjointed.

We learned on the first day that this suburb was a bit rougher than we thought when we came back to our renal car to find one of our windows smashed. It had been parked in the middle of the day at the side of a parking lot near residences, tennis courts, and our lodgings. Nothing other than some portable ipod speakers were taken, but the inconvenience of having no window made driving for the rest of the week annoying.

The good times had in the evenings of our trip through the Pyrenese informed our reaction to the broken window, so the good times continued to roll. We felt like skids driving around with a broken window so this sortof became the theme of the week. The kitchen at our lodgings didn’t have any cutlery, so we improvised and drank the wine straight from the bottles while sitting on beds.

Aside from nightly hijinx, we toured the architecture school building, a design school in St. Etienne (a town near Lyon), an industrial redevelopment project in Lyon, and a tour of the old textile neighbourhood of Lyon. All of these tours were given in French, with our instructor offering poor paraphrased translations. My French isn’t that great, but I knew what was going on, and could sometimes translate better than him. This made me annoyed.

We also toured old stuff in Vienne and Perouge, but getting to these places, and the places mentioned above, was always trying because our instructor did not provide us with adequate maps or directions. We had printouts from the internet that were often wrong, and other times when we tried following the instructor’s car, he would get lost. We eventually started navigating ourselves without his ‘help’ and usually arrived about 30mins before he did (even though we left at the same time). This was not without excitement, however.. on one occation we took a wrong turn down a street in downtown St. Etienne and found ourselves on the tram tracks and face to face with an oncoming tram. Heh heh. Fortunately, we encountred a police car about 10 seconds after the wrong turn who ignored our sketchily patched up car window and gave us directions.

I know this sounds rather disappointing, but I still had a great time! The food in France was, of course, amazing. We went out for dinner one night in downtown Lyon and I had a fantastic French onion soup, a river pike dumpling in a lobster bisque, and crème caramel for dessert. I also had numerous fantastic pastries, bread, and other goodies from the many patisseries located in every small French town. The Spanish bakeries no longer seem as enticing.

The best day of the actual course was the afternoon we spent cycling around the French countryside. I think I could go back there and spend an entire vacation in that area.. I didn’t want to leave! All of the little back roads were paved so we could meander wherever we liked, in and out of groves of trees, corn fields, forests, marshes, lakes, bare fields. Again, it was perfect weather, not too hot or too cold, and it was overcast so that the sun wasn’t too bright. I think I’ll remember that afternoon for a long, long time.

We stopped in another small French town and picked up snacks after the bike tour. Everyone knows that food never tastes better than when you have it after activity, and I believe that I had the BEST quiche of my life that afternoon.

**industrial design, urban design, architecture, planning, environmental science