Jeannine & Roger's French Cheese Odyssey

Vieux Lyon - 26th April

Relieving Roger of driving we went by train today to Vieux Lyon, the old medieval and renaissance quarter of Lyon. This is the main tourist area in Lyon so we had to share out adventures with a lot of people, however we could still sneak in a geocache at the ruins of the old St Jean church. Before tackling the next geocache we bought a baguette from the bakery, cheese and turkey from the dairy and had lunch by the Court of Appeal building on the river’s edge; it was either that or share the church steps with students and beggars.

Cheese Experience No. 5 Today’s cheese is Saint-Felicien which is produced in the Rhône Alps region with milk from only seventy local dairy farms. It is known as a Lyonnais cheese because a long time ago a dairyman from Place Saint Félicien, in Lyon, sold milk to customers after skimming off the cream. At night he put the cream into the milk that hadn’t been sold and turned it into cheese. The combination of milk and cream gives it a soft creamy interior. The exterior is a fine wrinkly white rind; I thought it looked like the surface of a brain. No sweet treat today as the cheese was quite enough, so much so it comes with a warning, “It is not recommended for vulnerable populations to consume”.

The photo (above right) shows the speciality of Lyon, Pink Praline Brioche. I made it once; it was awful I wasn’t game to try it again.  We set off to find a geocache based on Traboules, which were passages that went under or through buildings. Because some not so bright town-planner allowed people to construct big buildings right next to or backing on to each other without a gap, another smarter person designed Traboules so you didn’t need to make a big trip around the mass of buildings. There are 300 Traboules in Vieux Lyon unfortunately only one is open to the public but it was closed for lunch today.

Our next cache was based on Saint Pauls station and church. Once the cache was achieved we went back to a sign pointing to the more impressiveFourvière Basilica Notre Dame. Blow geocaching, if I hadn’t seen the sign we may have gone back to town and caught the funicular up the hill to the Basilica and avoided climbing the hundreds of steps! Oh well the cheese needed walking off.

The Basilica is classed as “minor”, which means it has privileges conferred by Papal Brief. There was nothing minor about it, the interior was ornate, the exterior had a separate bell tower with a gilded statue of the Virgin Mary, but most impressive was that it was actually two churches. At ground level was a larger more ornate church and below ground was a more simple church. We left the hill by the Funicular, more for the experience of course. The header picture is a view of Vieux Lyon from the Fourviere hill that the Basilica is on.

Essence of France Photo Challenge 4: Cathedrals France has a lot of cathedrals; their history and opulence never ceases to amaze me. Below are some of the churches of Vieux Lyon that we visited today.
Photos of St Jeans, Basilica (in and out)