Lyon

 

 

While in Mayotte, my violin and I had had a bit of an accident. A friend of a friend agreed to make me a new one, with six strings instead of the usual four. As he lived and worked in Lyon, down south (this said, everything is down south from Lille), I hitchhiked down on Sunday to fetch the violin. It took a while, as I started off at 7 in the morning and didn't get in until 10 at night. One of my first cars was a police van, which was when I learned that it was forbidden to hitchhike on the motorway: they explained how dangerous it was, then took me to the nearest safe stopping place. We had a good laugh and they even blared the siren for me. I made a bit of a mistake near Chaumont, when I ended up going north instead of south and lost a few hours, but got into Lyon safely. Among my transporters for the day were the police van, a lady who dropped me off then ran after me to give me her phone number and ask for news of my trip and a photo of the violin, a gypsy who was going round France in his van doing odd jobs, a wine-seller who nearly dropped me in the middle of nowhere when he found out he wasn't getting my phone number, a sociology researcher in his fifties who had done a lot of hitchhiking when he was younger, a lady who told me all about her marriage to a man and said that it's much better now she's married to a woman, and a friendly handicapped lad who couldn't use his legs and had therefore rigged his car with accelerators behind the steering wheel, a brake he could use with his hands and a captor on the gear stick which pushed the clutch for him when he put his hand on the lever.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

While in Lyon, I contacted a hiking friend whom I'd met in Réunion island and who lived nearby. He took me out to a traditional Lyonnais restaurant (where I ate a rather weird local speciality: a deep-fried slice of tripe, called tablier de sapeur, which I will not be trying again) and showed me all around the town. It's a pretty town, but all the roads seem to lead upwards! There's a huge basilica called Basilique de Fourvière at the top of the town, which allows for a good view of the whole city, and a lovely historic area.

 

 

The point of the Lyon operation was to collect the violin pictured above. I finally met the violin-maker with whom I'd been communicating via e-mail for the last six months. He turned out to be a real chatterbox, and took two days to tell me all about how to care for the instrument, what strings to buy, etc. It's a lovely violin, made of cedar for the front and walnut for the sides and back, instead of the usual maple and spruce. Now I just have to learn how to play it.

 

 

 

Violin in box, I stayed the night with my tour guide friend and set off the next day back up to Lille. My first car took me about 20km north, my second car was a couple heading for Paris who dropped me off in Beaune, south of Dijon, and my third vehicle was the main one: a female lorry-driver, Béatrice, who took me from Beaune right up north to Lens, about an hour's drive away from Lille. She wanted to avoid the traffic jams and went off on a side road, dropping me at the motorway toll booth where I was quickly picked up by lorry driver number 2, Patrice. His job was to empty his lorry in the depot, then he said he would take me as close to Lille as he could get. We went up to the depot, where he told me to wait there and went to enquire about emptying his lorry, then came back muttering that they wouldn't empty it today, he'd have to sleep at the depot and empty it tomorrow morning. He took me back in to the depot with him to complain, saying that he might be able to find someone else there to drive me back to Lille. I smiled sweetly at the manager, and half an hour later, the lorry was empty. The driver dropped me off a couple of blocks down the road from my flat, in a nice big 44-ton lorry. I thought that was wonderful.