Parlez-vous Anglais?

Yesterday I became more sick than the day before so we didn’t do much except go get some pasta in old town at night so we wouldn’t eat at Brasserie George again.  Today, the last of our four days in Lyon, I felt slightly better and we set out to see as much of Lyon as we could before leaving. 

We decided to be lazy and buy a day pass for the transit system, which gets you unlimited use of the metro, bus, and tram for €4.50.  After checking out all of old town using the metro system, we headed up to the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière, a beautiful Roman-Catholic basilica overlooking Lyon, and the nearby Roman ampitheatre, which is the oldest Roman theatre in France and is free to enter!  Without having to walk everywhere we were finished seeing the main sights and attractions by five o’clock, so we decided to use our transit pass to go check out the biggest mall in Lyon, near the train station. 

While window shopping, we stumbled upon a big Wal-Mart-type store and thought it’d be a good idea to pick up chips and fruit for our upcoming train ride tomorrow.  The checkouts were really busy so we lined up at the under-five-items checkout, thinking it might be faster.  We were behind an old man who was deeply engrossed in a conversation with some other shopper, and, about 5 minutes later, the other shopper left and the old man started talking to us in French!  We tried to understand him but it was totally hopeless and all we could do was shrug and look at each other in confusion. 

Despite the fact that we kept shaking our heads and saying “je ne comprend pas” the old man wouldn’t stop talking us – it was like he was insisting we should understand him and he kept repeating himself, but we just couldn’t figure out what he was talking about!  It sounded like he was saying something about being in the war in Vietnam, but we really had no clue.  Then he started to talk to the lady who came in line behind us and we asked her if she spoke English, but unfortunately she didn’t, so we were stuck in the slowest line-up ever listening to this old man rant incoherently at us and the lady for what felt like half an hour.  The lady didn’t seem to enjoy the conversation and Paul started to get annoyed because he felt like the old man was insulting us to her, but I figured he was just some old lonely man who likes to talk so I kept smiling politely. 

When we finally got to the front and paid, we rushed away as fast as we could to avoid having the old man follow us – I felt bad for him but I really couldn’t deal with another half an hour of it!  In hindsight, we should have just picked up chips and fruit at the train station