When I landed in Lyon, I thought to myself “Back to civilization” and immediately was embarrassed. But that’s what I felt like. I spent a long time thinking about why.

It’s not like Morocco or Senegal are uncivilized in any meaningful sense.¹ Part of it was the unpleasant flight on which I was arriving.² But most of it was just being somewhere I didn’t need to think about being, for the first time in a long while. I could have sleepwalked from the airplane to baggage control to the train into Lyon.³ I bought a ticket for the train and a ticket for the public transit without even blinking. The whole thing was painless.

That’s what felt like civilization to me. Barbaric means a baffling public transit system or confusing border controls. Civilization means familiar food in the restaurants. The specifics differ for everybody; maybe it’s 5G rather than 4G coverage in the cell phone network, or the ability to get by on debit cards rather than cash. Maybe it’s someplace they speak your native language or somewhere you can order food delivered through an app.

The important thing is it’s a place you can inhabit on autopilot. You don’t have to think about every little detail, how you’re going to get across town or where to eat or whether you should get more cash. When I lived in New York a deli opened up around the corner from my apartment with a great selection of vegan sandwiches⁴ and from then on I always knew if I was heading home and hadn’t gotten anything to eat I could always stop and grab dinner without having to think about it. How very civilized.

I’m largely trying not to travel on autopilot, which is why I’m visiting places like Morocco and Senegal. They’re more rewarding in many ways. But you can’t live like that all the time. It’s exhausting. It’s important to take breaks, to come back to places where you don’t need to stress over every little detail. I suppose it’s a sign of just how comfortable I am in the EU that I can feel that way about towns in France I’ve never visited before.

Lyon is a city that’s been on my list ever since I read Dirt by Bill Buford. The book details the five years the author spent in the city learning the ins and outs of French cuisine. Lyon is widely regarded as the pinnacle of French cooking⁵ and is renowned for its bouchons, a type of small restaurant that tends to focus on hearty traditional food and a warm, friendly atmosphere. It’s also attracted a number of culinary superstars and they’ve gathered a staggering number of Michelin stars between them.

In other words, it’s a nearly perfect city for a particular sort of person. And it’s almost true of myself, as well. But it’s France, and French cuisine — particularly the tradition-laden food of Lyon — is overwhelmingly meat-based. It’s hard for me to find dinner.

I certainly didn’t starve, mind you. I booked in at L’Ouest⁶ and found a couple things I could have on the menu,⁷ and had previously reserved a nice place with a view for dinner on Thursday. But one of the joys of Lyon is wandering down the street past all the restaurants and seeing what’s on the menu⁸ and invariably none of them have vegetarian options. It’s all sausage or coq au vin or seafood. I found a boulangerie serving four kinds of pizza: chicken, tuna, salmon, and chorizo. There was a Mexican restaurant where you could choose between the beef and pork quesadilla. It was a bit much. I eventually found a vegan burger joint.

It’s disappointing, although I should have expected it. And the city’s undeniably lovely; it has the feel of Paris but manages to be more relaxed and welcoming.⁹ I spent a long afternoon visiting the Roman amphitheater and the historical museum. If I ever go back, I’d like to visit the art museum. But that’s always the question: given the breadth and depth of the world, how much time can you spend someplace where you’re never quite welcome?

I spent most of the last week hanging out at a friend’s place in the Vercors. The Vercors is a set of mountains in the Prealps¹⁰ running south of Grenoble which form these long, narrow valleys between the ranges. It’s known primarily for the doomed band of Maquis¹¹ who declared the “Free Republic of Vercors” about two months too soon in 1944. There’s only a handful of roads leading into the plateau, so they were right it was easy to blockade. But the Germans just flew a bunch of soldiers in by gliders and massacred them. The Allied forces liberated the area just a few weeks later.

I was there for the skiing; there’s better¹² skiing around Grenoble and further into the Alps but there were a number of perfectly nice if modest resorts around. It hardly mattered. What little snow there was at the beginning of the season melted away in the face of the heat wave that’s bedeviled Europe all winter.

So I spent five days in a small house nearly 10 minutes drive from the nearest village and about a half-hour from anything bigger than that, with about as much to do as that implies. It was great. I could have stayed longer, and I wouldn’t have been disappointed to have gone skiing a couple of times. But it was kind of nice to get up without having anything more pressing than lunch, dinner, and a reasonable bedtime to schedule.¹³

I didn’t do absolutely nothing; I visited the monument to the resistance fighters, took a short walk up to one of the many scenic wind-swept cliffs in the area,¹⁴ and even stopped at a whisky distillery on the way to catch my train out on Wednesday.¹⁵ I also napped. And got some work done.

I stayed the night at the Lyon Airport before my flight to Tel Aviv. That was rougher than I expected. The hotel was in Terminal 2 but everything else was shut down while they remodeled so I had to shamble over to Terminal 1 where the only thing that was open without going through security at 8pm was a convenience store. They had a perfectly reasonable mozzarella-tomato-and-basil sandwich so that was dinner.

I’ll be back in France eventually, possibly as soon as May — I’ve got tentative plans to meet a friend in Paris before Knudepunkt — and I’m sure I’ll enjoy myself. But I’m starting to reach a kind of equilibrium with the country, I think. There’s a lot I like and a lot I don’t. Maybe that’s what it means to be civilized, too. There’s no reason to get particularly excited about anything.

The first vegan restaurant to receive a Michelin star permanently closed in 2022. I had read about it in 2019, even arranged my travel in France in May specifically so I could visit, but it had shut down then because of the difficulty of hiring people post-COVID and never managed to recover. They promise it’ll be back, in some form, eventually. And when it is France will be just a little more welcoming, a little more friendly to vegetarians, and if and when it happens I’ll plan another trip, just to see.

Next: Tel Aviv (TLV) to Prague (PRG)
Prev: Dakar (DKR) to Lyon (LYS)

Footnotes

¹ The technical definition includes things like urban population centers and large buildings or monuments, so about the only places I’ve been that don’t qualify are the outer Hebrides and the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

² My flight from Senegal left at 1am, which was then delayed for two hours with absolutely no information. And as soon as I had gotten to sleep Air Algérie turned on all the cabin lights and proceeded to serve dinner. At 4am.

I had to transfer at Algiers, and with the delay only had about an hour. That would have been fine, except for some reason they made everyone from the flight go through passport control — a 45 minute process — and then rather than enter the country you had to go back and show the entry stamp to someone who verified it, then show it to someone else who stamped it again, and then go through security despite none of us even leaving the secure area of the airport.

I arrived at the gate just as they were announcing the last call for boarding.

³ Given how little sleep I got on the flights, I basically did.

⁴ They made a vegan chopped cheese which filled a serious void in my New York experience.

⁵ And if you’re the sort of person who regards French cooking as the pinnacle of world cuisine, that puts Lyon at the center of the gastronomic universe.

⁶ The late Paul Bocuse is one of the titans of French gastronomy and L’Ouest is one of the four brasseries they ran in Lyon. It felt appropriate for a minor pilgrimage.

⁷ The Baba au rhum was served whole alongside a bottle of rum. They cut open the cake and pour the rum over it right there in front of you, letting you decide when to say stop. I’m not sure it needed two whole shots of rum, but I certainly wasn’t going to turn down the opportunity.

⁸ All of them feature a deal with a starter, a main course, and a dessert. Trust me. You really should order the set menu.

⁹ During Roman times Lyon — then called Lugdunum — was the capital of its province and far more important than Paris. Lyon hasn’t forgotten.

¹⁰ Literally, “pre-Alps”

¹¹ I have no idea why Star Trek choose to name their fictional resistance movement after a real one. I’m sure it was explained at some point.

¹² Or at least bigger and fancier

¹³ If I ever visit you and it feels like I’m kind of weirdly disinterested in seeing the local sights, it’s likely a combination of this and a general unwillingness to impose upon your hospitality.

¹⁴ The Vercors is subject to a lot of odd microclimates, and there happened to be snow down on the ground just a bit higher up than we were — still not enough to snow on, but more than enough to provide a little ambiance for a brisk walk.

¹⁵ The distillery, Sequoia, is named because there’s a lone and somewhat inexplicable Sequoia growing on the farm they converted. The tour was in French so not nearly as informative as it could have been, but I got the gist of it and the whisky was pretty good.

They’ve only been operating for about five years so it’s really difficult to tell how their 8-year and 12-year and 18-year batches are going to turn out, but they seem to be doing pretty well.