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Monday, the 16th: Sightseeing and Practices

We slept relatively long on Monday (for skating event standards) and actually had breakfast at our hotel, which is something we hardly ever managed in Dortmund for example. Afterwards we went out for some sightseeing in Lyon, we had luck with the weather, since on that day it was relatively warm and also not raining. We didn't have much of a clue of what to see in Lyon, so we just took a metro to Vieux Lyon and walked around a bit. We saw some Cathedral and then walked up a long steep hill (that we could have gotten up with public transportation too :P , but I guess it was good to walk a little considering how much we were going to sit during the week) to get a view over Lyon and we looked at a nice Basilique (I probably should have noted down the name of some things :P ). We then took a small funny „Steilbahn“ (tram that only went up and down the steep hill) back down into the city and went back to the Bellecour place. They had put up a little ice surface there and some advertising colums for Europeans, with photos of Delobel & Schönfelder and plakate who explained the different jumps in figure skating. After walking back to the train station throught the pedestrian precinct and buying a nice sandwich for lunch, we walked on to the practice rink (which was near to the Perrache station) and arrived for some OD practices. Looking at the schedule, I realized that we were going to see all groups except the one with Israel which had already finished, which was a bit disappointing for me, but it was still nice to see the others and I took a lot of photos (and decided that I was going to watch ChaSaks 7:50 am morning OD practice on Thursday instead...). It was no problem to get into the practice rink, our tickets weren't even checked. Somewhen during the practice Katja and I decided we'd like a coffee and looked for a machine or something, since there wasn't anything, Katja asked the security guy if there is any possibility to get a coffee or tea, he told us the rink bistro is only for „le patineurs“, but then offered to get us a coffee and got us one from the bistro (even for free), just told us to be „sssssh“ about it ;) There also was a guy with some leftover snacks that he offered to us. We thought that all the French people in Lyon were very friendly anyway (with some very few exceptions that are going to be mentioned later) and many of them even spoke French, that was much better than in Italy last year. After the dance practice, there was supposed to be pairs practice, but I suppose most of them had used the earlier practice session in the main rink, since in the first group only Pla & Bonheur and in the next one only Fitze & Rex showed up. So we left somewhen during their group after seeing the runthrough of their Mission Impossible SP. In the evening we went to the Italian restaurant we had found earlier.

Susanne and Katja thought it looked a bit strange, since all the decoration and outside were pink and red and they suspected it was a brothel covered up as a restaurant ;) (plus I thought the name was strange, since it was called „Monna Lisa“, but inside it was very nice and the food was excellent, I had a pizza, red wine and a strawberry milkshake afterwards. We thought it was funny that tons of Christmas decoration was still up in Lyon and that all the trams were still showing „Bonne Fetes“ messages in their displays and similar.