I'm trying to catch up to what I'm doing right now, but since we had quite a lot of sightseeing on the weekend, I thought I might just do a short recap of this week and treat the other stuff later - as my roommate and I went to Geneva on Saturday, there is quite a lot to tell! Yesterday I didn't have time to write as I was cooking with some Germans from my course - we did Sauerkraut for our international lunch in our french course today (it was delicious). Having tasted everything at the lunch, I decided to definitely visit Brasil some time since they have really delicious desserts. Also, my final exam and my presentation on the Lyon Opera is fast approaching, and I don't know my text yet! 

Today I'm gonna talk about our courses' visit to the Musée Tony Garnier in the 8th arrondissement last Friday. This museum is an outside museum, which means you could visit it without paying. I am going to explain why getting a tour is worthwhile later - now I'm going to introduce you to Tony Garnier, what he did for Lyon and also the parts of the museum. It is situated in the quartier Etas-Unis, which was built by the aforementioned architect as urban housing for the population of workers, since in his times they had really bad living conditions. He was sensitive to their problems because he grew up as a child of textile workers, but still managed to become an architect, which was really unusual for the times - he was born in the latter part of the 19th century! Tony Garnier worked very closely with Lyons' mayor, who gave him many projects, the quartier des Etas-Unis being one of them. In this quarter, he left a lot of space for the planting of trees and greenery in general, and for the rent you pay it's a very nice place to live. 

The museum itself is composed of several murals on the walls of the building, which tell of his projects, his imagined city-utopia "La Cite industrielle", which was an earlier project of his that inspired the Etas-Unis quarter. Another part of the murals (in total 25, we did not visit all of them) were imagined utopian cities from artists from all over the world. The second part of the museum is a workers' apartment, still furnished in the style it was built in the thirties of the last century. These apartments had access to water and a private bathroom, apparently a luxury in these times for people coming from the countryside. If you get a tour, you also have the opportunity to visit the temporary exhibitions. The tour guide was very competent and gave us a lot of information. If you don't speak french, you can get an audioguide in your language. All in all, it was a bit tiring (since it was all in french and we walked quite a bit) but definitely a great experience if you are interested in Urban Studies or architecture and/or staying in Lyon a bit longer. 

PS: apparently you need a medical certificate from a doctor to run a 10k here ... (???) I am going to try to get one at the infirmary next week. In Austria, nobody cares (even if you do a half marathon), so that's very funny for me, but then again, the french do love their bureaucracy ;) 

Upcoming: Geneva and a post on CERN!