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LYON, FRANCE - Things sort of fell apart on the 26th. The weather was horrible, we were both miserably sick, and we didn't have a very clear picture of what we wanted to do in this part of France. The territory itself was strange, alternating beautiful, rolling green countryside with ugly industrial complexes, nuclear power plants and lumber yards.
We stopped briefly in Avignon, where they have a McDonald's with a very clean bathroom, and Orange, where they have an unusually well-preserved Roman theatre and an odd, dusty little museum containing everything from the town's original Roman land-grant map to a stuffed crocodile. In Lyon we decided to cut our losses and stop for the night.
Just outside of Lyon we stopped in Vienne, where we saw the one scene I wish I had a picture of: In the town park, a group of elderly men were playing petanque (it's like bocce) on a sandy lot, and, 25 feet away, the local teenagers were enjoying a skateboard ramp.
Anyway, since we have no worthwhile pictures of the 26th, I'll share with you instead this ad for the the South Park
Christmas Special, translated into French, of course, from our hotel in Vichy. I don't know if you can read the text on this scan, but
if you can you can learn lots of useful French phrases like "politiquement incorrect," "blasphémateurs" and "Monsieur Hankey, le petit
caca Noël."
What "South Park" is to France, "The Simpsons" is to Italy. We saw tee shirts and postcards of Bart everywhere, and one night in Rome
we stumbled onto a whole piazza full of people drinking mulled wine and raptly watching "The Simpsons," dubbed into Italian, on a large outdoor screen.
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