Sightseeing
Yesterday Christian and I finally did our first serious sightseeing excursion after being in Lyon for nearly three weeks. There is a very large hill which towers over Vieux Lyon and has this amazing castle-like basilica at the top, so we decided to go there. The walk up was hefty, but we got some great panoramic views of the whole city from the park grounds at the top of the hill. The basilica, (Notre Dame de Fourvière) is quite beautiful both inside and outside. The neat thing is they let you also go into the crypt under the church, where they have all these religious icons on display. Featured very prominently among them was the Black Madonna*, one of the most famous symbols of Poland. I was completely surprised to stumble upon it here. Naturally, the one here is a reproduction of the original, but it's still weird seeing something you associate very strongly with one country in an unexpected location in another country. Incidentally, the wikipedia page doesn't tell how the Black Madonna stopped the Swedish invasion of Poland: the Swedes had overtaken the city of Częstochowa and while they were ransacking the church, a soldier sliced two gashes into Mary's cheek with his sword (take a close look at the image on the wiki page). Legend has it that the painting started bleeding from those two gashes and the Swedes were so frightened that they left and called off their invasion.
After looking at the basilica, we headed over to the ruins of a Graeco-Roman theater and odeon and toured through the adjacent museum. The museum was pretty neat since it not only had Greek and Roman artifacts from the area, but also artifacts from cultures significantly before them, dating back to Paleolithic times. They also had a large exhibit on the Celts who lived in the region and their religion and rituals. There were quite a few mentions that "Gaul" is a misnomer for the people of France at that time, since there were several autonomous groups living in France at the time that had different cultures and religions. Apparently Julius Caesar just conjured up that umbrella term so he would have some definite group of people to say that he conquered.
All in all, it was a pleasant afternoon, and it was relaxing not doing any work the entire day.
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* I'm having issue with this link, since the URL has the Polish letter ę in Częstochowa but my LJ program keeps converting it to an 'e' in the URL.
After looking at the basilica, we headed over to the ruins of a Graeco-Roman theater and odeon and toured through the adjacent museum. The museum was pretty neat since it not only had Greek and Roman artifacts from the area, but also artifacts from cultures significantly before them, dating back to Paleolithic times. They also had a large exhibit on the Celts who lived in the region and their religion and rituals. There were quite a few mentions that "Gaul" is a misnomer for the people of France at that time, since there were several autonomous groups living in France at the time that had different cultures and religions. Apparently Julius Caesar just conjured up that umbrella term so he would have some definite group of people to say that he conquered.
All in all, it was a pleasant afternoon, and it was relaxing not doing any work the entire day.
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* I'm having issue with this link, since the URL has the Polish letter ę in Częstochowa but my LJ program keeps converting it to an 'e' in the URL.