Kyle Hepp

July 6, 2011

ETA: The first newsletter is going out tomorrow. I haven’t figured out how to put a sign up thingy in my sidebar yet but for now if you’re interested in signing up you can do so here.

Two things before this blog post. First! I guest posted for my friend Jamie on her blog, The Modern Tog. It’s a great resource for photographers and if you’re not following already, you should be! She invited me to write my 5 Travel Tips for Photographers. This is definitely applicable to wedding photographers, but also totally applicable really to travelers in general trying to bring along their photo gear. I was honored to post for her and I’d love for you to check it out!

Secondly, I want to remind people that they can still sign up for the newsletter if they’d like. I’ll be sending out the first one in approximately two weeks, maybe a bit sooner. I know some people had trouble accessing the sign up on their browser, but that should be fixed now. Sorry for the technical difficulties!

Last Lyon post! Sad, it’s such a pretty city I don’t want to leave it behind — even on the blog. But that does mean that we’re coming up on more London, plus some Barcelona. Get ready for Gaudi, my friends.

So one of the days we were there, we decided to walk up to visit the giant church at the top of the hill that looks like a castle — even though Virginie told us it wasn’t that pretty. Sadly, she was right, but I still enjoyed the walk up the mini mountain because we got some great city views and I was able to fully appreciate just how big Lyon actually is. I knew it was the second largest city in France, after Paris, of course, but I was still surprised to see just how it sprawled on forever.

We started out walking from our hotel, this is somewhere near. It was a really hot day.

Doesn’t it look like a castle?

We passed through one of the secret passage ways. Apparently during the Nazi invasion the Lyonnaise people were able to use the winding streets and secret passage ways to hide. They were very effective in evading their enemies because of this. The apartment buildings that these passageways lead to are still in use by regular people who live there today. There are signs that say the public are welcome to pass through and visit the typical buildings, but to please be quiet and respect the residents privacy. If it were me, as beautiful as a building were, I don’t think I would want to live in a place that tourists and people were constantly passing through!

This is the market again. Just a leftover picture of when they were closing it down.

And of course, Vivi and Pierre’s famous candy store!

This was the start of the stairs that we climbed.

Oh how we climbed.

Like I said, great city views. You can see the first river that crosses Lyon right towards the bottom of the photo. Then at the next line of green in the middle of the photo is the second river. I still don’t know which is the boy river and which is the girl river. That big ugly circular building in the middle I believe is a Radisson or Hyatt hotel. Of course the city’s eyesore is a gringo building.

Seba kept making fun of me because I stopped at every single landing to take another cityscape photo. He would say, “But we’re only ten meters higher, why do you want another?!” I have no idea. I thought they would different the higher we got I have about a hundred of these pics and they all look the same.

Ta-DA! We made it to the church.

Sometimes I am asked if I photoshop out the tourists from my pictures because a lot of times there is nobody in them. The answer is no. I wait. And I wait. And then I wait some more. This picture was like the only millisecond that there was nobody walking up or down the stairs. There are actually like four people right behind the Lyon about to walk. It was luck and patience that I was able to get a photo with nobody in it on these steps.

This is something that bothered me about Notre Dame in Paris when we were there in 2009. I didn’t realize it was something normal in French churches — the coin machine. You put a coin in and it prints out some kind of church stamped coin in return. Still don’t like it. It feels so Disney-world-ish. Not Catholic-ish.

I didn’t care for the decoration inside the church so I didn’t take many pictures. Virginie was right. It was pretty enough but soooo ornate that it really seemed ostentatious for a church. Not my favorite we’ve seen, that’s for sure!

There are some Roman ruins in Lyon. That surprised me. I mean, duh, it makes total sense that there are Roman ruins in France once you think about their history, but I really never think about Roman ruins being anywhere other than Rome. Ha. Anyway. We weren’t allowed to go in and explore because they were hosting a summer concert of some sort. Lyon has all kinds of fun goings on during their vacation season!

The end. Au revoir Lyon.