While gushing about the Maison de Canuts, I forgot to tell you guys all about how Croix-Rousse looks and feels today! My roommate is surely waiting for me to give you a resumé on her summer-school project and appropriating all her hard work ;). In the last 10 years, the district was gentrified, leading to a diverse and vibrant area full of little shops and cafés, not at all touristy like for example Vieux-Lyon. The clothes shops offer almost all local fashion designed in Lyon, and I'm sure one can spend a lot of money there on, for example, scarves alone. If I had to compare it to a district in Vienna, I'd say it most closely resembles Neubau, the 7th district. Croix-Rousse itself is located in the 1st and 4th arrondissements in Lyon. If you want to visit Lyon, definitely get an Hotel/apartment/your choice of bed-like arrangement here, it's well connected to the whole city. The only downside being, of course, the vast amount of stairs one has to scale when leaving the district, but to avoid that one can take the metro. 

We first went down a street called the "Montée de la Grande Côté", a lovely scenic walk in the heart of the area. At the top was a small park where one could see the snowy mountains in the French Alps. I'm really glad it has only rained here as of yet! The street itself is pedestrian and lined with small shops and bakeries, ending in the lower parts of Croix-Rousse. We actually had to walk up again, since we wanted to get a better view of the city, and by midday I was really tired of all the walking! The view itself though was lovely, and in my opinion even better than from Fourvière, as there were no tourists at all. I'll be sure to post a picture of it on Instagram (look at my cross-platform marketing skills! :). 

After having a quick lunch in Vieux-Lyon, we went to the Musée des Automates, which is open 7 days out of 7, but only from 14-18h. They had a short introduction on how to make an automaton, which nowadays involves an electrical motor and a rather clock-like arrangement of notched dials, which, connected by levers, control the different body parts of the automaton. Different automatons were arranged in sets, each set representing a different scene and being labelled with extra information, such as on Jules Verne or Mozart's The enchanted flute (and of course they'd have "Der Hölle Rache" playing in the background! :D). What I found really interesting is that the idea of animated dolls has been floating around at least since antiquity, and only became feasible once clocks became a common occurence. The museum itself reminded me a bit too much of a Doctor Who episode in which evil automatons attack the Doctor, but for a non-biased visitor, I think they'd appear quite cute. I'm also really surprised at how many museums Lyon has, and I'll make sure to visit at least 80% of them! Tomorrow though will have a rather different tinge to it ... Stay tuned for a sweet surprise!