Lyon Shopping

have not visited this shop but I have eated some chocolates yestarday....unbelievable! Have you love the movie "Chocolat"...? I think here it's your paradise!

What to buy: chocolate and... chocolate!!!

What to pay: I think it's more expensive than average but it's worth the pain !

It's the street with most of the stores just in the centre of town. In it and the streets around you can find really all kinds of stores an buy everything- from books, cd-s, food, jewlery, man and women's clothes, shoes...

One of the biggest, if not the biggest mall in Lyon, Part Dieu.
Conveniently located in a centra part of town, and easily to spot as its located close to the unique Credit Lyonnais building.

This mall has over 260 shops that will accommodate amost any purchase you plan to make.
Centre opening hours are from 0930 until 1930.

Halle de Lyon is a food shopper's paradise in downtown Lyon. Butchers, bakers, and coffee roasters extraordinaire.

What to buy: Let Axelle Rude-Bettolo blend a special coffee just for you. She will numerically code it so that your own unique blend can be recreated when you visit a second time. She is very cordial, professional, and extremely talented when it comes to coffee. Her english is excellent, and she will allow you to practice your bad French without rebuking you.

This shop is a sort of art gallery with a difference.

Instead of being a huge hollow space with strategically places canvasses, this is more like a modern poster shop.

Under an artwork by a particular artist, will be a stand, containing works of different sizes. 5x5, 10x10 and 20x20cm. All the work on that stand will be by that one artist.

What to buy: There are perhaps 20 stands and artists in the shop in an interesting range of styles.
All are priced the same for each size. The back of each piece has the price, and the price including frame.

The piece that I bought was by an artist named Francoise Amadieu. This sweet and pretty piece is painted and carved from cardboard, and although that just sounds odd, the final piece truly is very lovely.

I think that the way that this shop is set up is brilliant. It gives artists good exposure and makes art extremely accessible to the public.

What to pay: The 20 x 20 artwork I bought cost 122 euro, 144 with a frame.

rue Victor Hugo and rue de la Republique are the 2main shopping streets in Lyon, there you can find the small typical french shops but also some big department stores like Fnac.

What to buy: Shops are open till 19h30 !!!!

In Venissieux, there is a small area with French and multi-national chain stores, rather like the one at the Southpark shopping complex in Colonial Heights, Virginia. I wouldn't be surprised to see a Wal-Mart there next time I come. We took lunch inside the Carrefour super store at a Brioche Dorée coffee shop (there's one at every stone's throw because I saw one at the Part Dieu shopping centre downtown). Luc had a sandwich. I took quiche Lorraine.

After lunch, it was off to Toys 'R Us. Things got interesting before we even darkened the doorstep of that international toy store. Finding a parking slot was, for a time, a task akin to finding grits in New Jersey. Several times, when we would approach a parking slot, some woman would cut out in front of us and get there first. Luc had to go shopping for baby Florian and his countless nieces and nephews. Therefore, I knew it was going to be a long, long afternoon. I shop in just as organised a fashion as I travel. I can get most of my shopping done within a half-time interval of an (American) football game.

The next stop was for groceries at Auchan, another one of those super centre stores where you can buy everything in one stop. I am glad that among the items on the list was bread as those hard and stale zwiebacks (called biscottes) were getting old real fast. I remembered to buy some of those herbs from Provence for my mama who loves to cook.

What to buy: Anything and everything. You have two hypermarkets, Auchan and Carrefour; a Toys 'R US; and even an Office Depot. If you come from the States blindfolded and they take off the blindfold here, you would doubt you were in France or any place outside the U.S.A.

Carrefour is rather like a French Wal-Mart. Like Wal-Mart, you can find Carrefour in both Argentina and Brazil. We don't have Carrefour in the USA yet, though.

What to buy: The first time, Luc and I were searching for a Christmas tree star, which by 7 December, were as rare as Democrats in Hanover County. We finally found a sorry-looking specimen, but you can't be choosy when you pick your Christmas tree star this late in the game.

The second time, Luc and Isabelle were buying things for Christmas and fixins for Florian's first birthday party the following Saturday (16 December). I thought it would be an hour or so at the Carrefour (meanwhile, I would exchange my francs into dollars and get James Ayres some herbs from Provence- the only reason I went along with them) and that would be the lot...like Gilligan's Island was supposed to be a 3-hour tour.

Although I had changed all my paper money back into good old American currency, I had enough coinage to buy those herbs for James. As I was looking for the herbs, I ran into a stewardess named Leslie who, it turned out, was to be part of my crew on the following day's trip over the big pond. At first, I thought she was French, so I asked her how to find the herbs from Provence in French. She must have thought I was French too. It was the first American voice I've heard since landing 8 days before. They fly from New York to Lyon every Tuesday evening, land on Wednesday morning, have the rest of that day free, and fly back on Thursday mornings. Leslie had to go meet up with the rest of the crew which included Calvin and Ruth from the flight over.

Luc and Isabelle bought enough groceries and whatnots to feed all of Rhône Alpes and parts of Isère. Since the grocery section of Carrefour was on the 4th floor and we parked in the bowels of the underground parking deck, I wondered about the logistics of getting that buggy full of groceries down to the Peugeot. It turns out, there is a freight lift which is big enough to hold two full buggies of groceries and right many people to boot.

What to pay: Like Wal-Mart, Carrefour is reasonably priced.