Lyon, France

So while I have spent this last week revising all my 'ologies' (as people in my comment box called them!) , and daily increasing my mean number of hours spent in the library (reaching a peak at 13 hours yesterday) (...and crashing to 5 hours today because I was totally exhausted!), my dear darling husband has spent the last week living it up in a chateau in Lyon, France.

un magnifique château



You may remember me saying a few weeks ago that he had been working at the lab till well after midnight for over a month (...Saturdays & Sundays included), because they had absolutely so much research to do for this conference thing.

Well, this last week in Lyon was that conference.

Luckily Chris did manage to get all his research done and his presentation written up (...with 5 whole hours to spare!!)
He came home at almost 1am in the wee hours of Monday morning....and at 6:30am on Monday he caught the train to France!!! woohoo for St. Joseph's intercession!

He gave his presentation on Tuesday, and spent the rest of the week relaxing...errr...'working hard' at the conference.

(seriously though, they went wine-tasting, had dinner in a vineyard, the castle had its own pool & tennis courts, they each got their own private appartment with flat screen tv...how much hard work could it possibly have been?!)

[edit: Chris corrected me...apparently each appartment had TWO flat screen tvs....]
[need I say more?!]

fancy trees!

There were even peacocks wandering round the castle grounds!!





Chris, hard at work:



The high-light for Chris was no doubt the food they got served; gourmet food at every meal.
Such as this apparently exquisite dessert ( he didn't save me any so I can't verify whether it actually was exquisite)

(jealous?! moi?! never!)

Red wine sorbet on a splash of caramel with a pastry stuffed with fresh cream and fresh wild fruits and berries with yummy chocolate at the bottom....

However he was significantly less impressed (& even slightly traumatised) by this particular meal:

A blob of rice, and some funny reconstitued fish roll....and then of course...the head:

Seriously, noone wants that kinda thing looking up at them from their plate!!

IT HAS EYES!

(heeheee! I set this image as the background on Chris's laptop!!)

There was also a Chapel in the Chateaux grounds, disused of course, but apparently quite pretty:

Chris said it has a lot of pigeon poo all over the place as they couldn't keep the pigeons out, which is a shame.


and this is the main baillica in Lyon; The Basilica of Notre Dame.

And although France may be a basically pagan country now-a-days with the number of practising Catholics slim-to-none (like Italy) (...I can say that, I am half-Italian and have seen the country from the inside), it's not too difficult to find evidence of their once flourishing faith; such as this statue of the Sacred Heart:

and look; what a touching sight, some sweet person had put a little flower in Jesus's hand:

awww! There is still faith in some people's hearts!

anyway, just a random selection of Chris's France-photos.

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