Feeling hot, hot, hot!

It has been hot in Lyon ever since I got back from my holiday and I have not been able to much more than moan about how hot it is and debate whether I should move into the fridge.

A good indicator of the temperature is the chicken man in the Croix Rousse market. He has one of those rotisserie stalls that you buy ready roasted chickens from. In the winter he is Mr Popular amongst the other stallholders who seem to all drop by and have a chat with him. I'm sure the length of the chat is in direct ratio as to how cold it is. However if you walk past the stall in the summer it appears to be unmanned. Then you notice him about 3 stalls down having a chat with the cheese man or the fish man, who have refrigerated trailers for their products! Yesterday he appeared to be having a long chat with one of the meat guys so it must have been hot.

The French seem to have an aversion to aircon though and maybe for good reason as it is always rumoured that the machines are great breeding grounds for nasty things that can make you ill. 'La clim' is a constant source of debate in the gym between those who want it and those who don't. However doing Body Pump or Zumba when it's 37° without aircon is most unpleasant, so you can make an educated guess as to which side I am on!

This afternoon my friend and I met at the ice cream place in Place Sathonay to cool down with an ice cream and catch up on the summer news. We managed to cool down a lot because as we sat and chatted(and had our ice creams) the clouds rolled in, the wind picked up and the rain started to fall.

Parlez-vous espanaise?

Whenever I go abroad my brain registers that I need to go into foreign language mode and due to a 6 month stint of working in Madrid when I was 20, the default language used to be Spanish. Since moving to France it has obviously become French and Spanish no longer gets a look in. Also since moving to France my holidays have mainly been going back to the UK and a trip to Morocco, where the default setting of French worked well for me, the friends I was with (Can you get them to sort out our aircon please? Can you ask the waiter if we can buy a bottle of wine to take back to the hotel?) and the locals.

However this default setting proved to be hard to overcome when traveling round Central America. I would start in Spanish and then end up in French, as well as try and pronounce Spanish words with a French accent. Towards the end of my trip I went to a lovely beach town and was looking for accommodation. I came across a promising looking place and asked (in Spanish) if there were any rooms available. The charming man showed me round and while we were negotiating a price for a week long stay and I thought to myself “Wow, well done, you’ve been conducting this whole conversation in Spanish!” Then came the realization that actually we were both talking in French. So much for my improved language skills!

His name was Franck and he was from Vichy.