On Monday, I saw an apartment in the 8ème arrondissement (the 8th "area" of town) which was pretty ghetto, and pretty far away from pretty much everything. I haven't heard back from the girl yet, but I don't think I would take it even if she accepted. Tomorrow, I have two meetings to see apartments...one is in a suburb called Villeurbanne, but is right on the city limit, next to La Parc de la Tète D'or, a huge park (that has a zoo!!!) in a nice neighborhood near a big Métro station...The other one I'm seeing tomorrow is a little further out, in the 3ème, near a bus stop. And I'm seeing another one on Friday that would be a room in a big house up on the hill in the 5ème near a bus stop as well. Having public transportation closeby is such an important factor in looking for an apartment, because the city is very spread out, but there are buses, trams, and Métro lines everywhere!
So the outlook is good for now, and I'm pretty sure all the apartments I am going to see are 400€ per month or less, which is less than $600 per month, which is less than I was paying for my apartment in Santa Barbara! :-P Plus, once I get my Carte de Séjour (essentially, my Green Card) I get to apply for the CAF, which is a monthly payment from the French government that students get as an incentive for them to live in France. Each month, I will get a certain amount of my rent paid back to me, which is awesome!
In other news, we had medical exams today, which was pretty interesting...it was pretty much a normal check up, except they weighed us in KG and measured us in Meters, haha. They also took a chest x-ray to check for TB, and we got to keep the X-ray! Unfortunately for us, it is super windy today, so our huge folders with the chest X-rays have been flopping around everywhere we go, since we've been hanging around at the university for the past few hours until our class starts in 20 minutes.
Oh, and speaking of weather, it is crazy here! It is normally in the low 80s or high 70s, which is pretty warm...but this past week, there have been 2 nights where it is POURING rain and last night there was a crazy lightning storm! I had never seen anything like it. But this morning, all was fine and dandy again and it's 77 degrees F now. So strange...
But for now, here are some pictures of Lyon besides the couple I posted a while back!
Me and another UCSB student, Molly, around Bellcour (the downtown area)
Notre Dame de Fourvière, the church at the top of the hill! So pretty!!
Some random Roman ruins on the hill.
Secret passageways, called traboules in Vieux Lyon (Old Lyon)...they are all over the place, and were used a long time ago for transporting Silk when it rained, and more recently during la Résistance of the Gestapo during WW2. My university's courtyards were actually used as holding areas for the Gestapo, ha ha.
Hôtel de Ville, which isn't in fact a hotel, but Lyon's City Hall!
A view of part of the city from our Boat tour of the Saone river. Très jolie!
After our boat tour, we got treated (well...our program fees treated us) to a very nice French three course dinner! This was the dessert, which was soo delicious. The other 2 courses were a fish cake type thing, and the second course was chicken with rice and veggies. Much better than the baguettes, cheese, and apples we've been surviving on during the week!
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