Since we've been living in the city of Lyon now for about two months I have had what I consider enough time to form an early impression of it. Okay, frankly I love the city but I hate the living in the city part if that makes any sense. Honestly I wonder to myself each day I'm here about folks who live in the city. How do you do it each and every day? How does city life just become a habit? If we stay in the Lyonnaise region I think we'll have to carve out a niche somewhere in the suburbs or further afield. I just don't see us becoming city folks for many reasons.
My list of complaints is all very mundane. Who hasn't heard someone complain about it all--the clichés of an urban existence. But here I go adding my same complaints to those I've heard myself a hundred times. For example there's the noise. Boy howdy there is noise! There's noise at four am with garbage trucks, at six am with early morning commuters revving up their cars, at the wee hours of the night with people locking up their cars drunk at three am. Noise, noise, noise it never stops! I'm constantly jarred awake with a rotating carousel of all manner of people conducting business at their own hours, oblivious to mine.
There's dirt and grunge. I'm okay, well perhaps used to living in a clean, tidy French village with it's own brand of bottled water, but the city grime is really awful. I think after they clean the streets they must have to start all over again at the beginning right away in order to keep up! Dodging doggie doo is a dance I haven't yet mastered, especially at the abundance of what seems to be a pile every other building front or so. I keep asking myself, if you see this trash and dirt every day how do you keep your spirits up? What does this do to the city dweller's morale. I don't consider myself a snob but I do feel the need to be surrounded by something other than crumpled sandwich wrappers and grimy splattered bus stops each and every day. I would hope that staying in the city for a period of time wouldn't condition me to overlook this, to accept it. Somehow this damages the soul over a period of time, right? Maybe that's why everyone in the city is so rude and grouchy, another little thing I've come to notice. In a country where nobody ever smiles, the city seems to be the place where everyone really, really scowls. It has to be the grime that makes them grumpy.
Finally there's just a general sadness that everyone seems to easily overlook. I immediately noticed the increase in the number of homeless people when we moved into our city apartment, completely normal in a large city, but what galls me is the lack of sincere empathy in the local people. Maybe I'm generalising but as an example, one of many, a homeless man stumbled into a Quick restaurant where I was drinking a coffee with my mother. He was asking for food, anything. He looked very sad and very hungry. You could see it in his eyes. Not many people looked up at him or made any eye contact. The manager came over quickly, scowled as if to say "not again," grabbed his arm and tossed him out. I understand the manager is just doing his job here and I guess I find that normal but how awful to work in an establishment where it's your JOB to throw out hungry people. Over and over again I see sadness and misery and poverty and callousness in the city. It's the callousness that bothers me. Would I become like this if I stayed? Would I stop noticing or caring?
There are many things to love about the city, and Lyon is such a beautiful city. I love the bridges and the stunning arteries of two gorgeous rivers running through its center, always basked in sunlight. I love the Roman theatres of Fourviéres perched on the hill overlooking the town, and I adore the lovely arched passages of the old city that make you feel as if you've suddenly fallen backwards in a time capsule to a place where you could easily see yourself bumping into a toothless merchant in robes. The food in this city is amazing, and a gastronomy exists that boggles the mind. The idea of being in a city with culture delights me, the opera and the theatre will be a treat I'll save my pennies for each season. I could definitely learn to love this city, don't get me wrong. I'm just not so sure I could come to love the city life, or that I want to become the type of person it would take to dutifully accept living here.
2 comments:
Hi misschrisc,
I've been lurking around your site for a while now. I think it's charming and interesting.
You've really summed up my exact feelings about the city. On the one hand, I love the culture. But then, it seems such a sad, lonely, and dirty place. I don't want my own child to grow up in the city, and that figuring into his experience of childhood. Many people would surely find that silly.
This is one reason we haven't come back to France - its so hard to find a job outside of an urban location, since everything is centralized. We still plan on returning in the next few years, however.
I live in Paris part of the time and I understand what you say about noise. Early in the morning I can hear the RER's-the giant commuter trains-rumbling under the streets starting at 5 AM. It is a distant noise but there. My main complaint is the neighbors. I hear our neighbor upstairs come home at 2 AM from his job and drop his boots on the floor and I hear his very crabby daughter scream when she wakes up in the middle of the night. I hear the owners of the cafe that share the center square of our block drag their garbage cans over the tiles to the street. I'm thinking of ear plugs.
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