For my last day in Lyon, I had a few things on my list.
In the morning, I went to the central library. This is a huge library. It was quieter and calmer than Nice’s central library.
At one point, I was sitting down and one of my sandals slipped off my feet. Very soon after, someone came around and asked me to put my sandal back on! This was a stark contrast to the laissez-faire approach of live and let live in Nice’s library!
Nonetheless, the library was a big community hub that attracted many people. I saw some tables with puzzles and drawing material.
My second destination was the Museum of Cinema and Miniatures. Outside of Paris, the pricing for museums and galleries is very reasonable. It’s usually about €10. The entrance to this museum was a whopping €22!
The museum has a variety of film memorabilia. I saw the (very long) batmobile from the first Tim Burton film.
I was pleasantly surprised to see Star Wars and Marvel stuff.
Babylon 5 was one of the first regular SciFi series after Star Trek. Star Trek was for a long time the only SciFi on TV. Babylon 5 paved the way for more SciFi. I watched it when it came out in the 1990s. It was riveting and became my favourite SciFi series. The museum had some prosthetics from the show.
There were quite a few spooky exhibits, such as realistic rubber faces of Mrs Doubtfire, Thelma and Louise, and Christopher Lee.
The most chilling exhibit was the robotic version of Alien. When it rotated and looked at you, opening its mouth, I felt a real sense of menace!
There were life-size sets from films (see second set of photos above). The smaller versions, miniatures, looked incredibly realistic. It must take considerable skill to work at that scale. Many of the photos below are miniature rooms the size of two shoe boxes!
I got my money’s worth from the museum. When I eventually emerged from the museum, the woman at the front door said, “You spent a lot of time in there!”
On leaving, my plan was to return to the Zeitgeist Cafe, which I went to yesterday. When I got there, it was empty. There were no customers. The two women I spoke to remembered me. Unfortunately, they said, they’re going to have to shut early because it’s been quiet all afternoon.
The temperature has been 36°C today. I didn’t want to be walking around to find another cafe. I checked Google Maps and there was a Starbucks nearby. I went to that.
After about 30 minutes, two young men sat close to me. I was talking to one of the baristas, who said she’d get me iced water after I’d finished by iced latte. I was telling her there’s no need to bring it to me but she insisted. One of the guys said something and I didn’t understand him. He switched to English. He said he and his friend thought I was Moroccan. They were Moroccans studying computer engineering in Lyon.
We had a long chat. It started with the World Cup then progressed to the job market. They wondered if it would be better for them to look for jobs in the UK. Quite a bit of the conversation was taken up with them asking me for job-hunting and interview advice and how they could get into the finance industry when they graduate next year.
After they left, I went to get some more water. I was drinking tons. The person at the till copied my accent and put a Cockney twist on it. We got talking about the French and English language.
He then asked me what is the hardest word in the English language. I wasn’t too sure what he meant by “hardest”. So I asked him what is the hardest word in French. He replied, “constitutionnellment”. I had a go pronouncing it and wasn’t far off, he said. It helped that the word is not that different from its English equivalent: constitutionally.
I decided he wanted to see if he could pronounce a long English word. Long foreign words must be his speciality. So I said “antidisestablishmentarianism”, which I vaguely remembered was one of the longest regular words rather than the many long technical terms in English.
He had a good ear and, on his second attempt, he pronounced the English word fairly well. We shook hands and I returned to my seat to cool down with my topped up iced water.