lost in Lyon...

I awoke on Sunday and found my way to the Train Station. Since I have so much baggage, I decided to take a Taxi so I wouldn't have to do the stairs in the metro. I got to Gare de Lyon with plenty of time to spare. Even the train stations in Paris are beautiful! The train arrived and I hopped on. I was a bit wary about where I should sit. Last time I took a train in a foreign country, I was with Brooke. We had 2nd class tickets & totally thought we were in 2nd class. Wrongo batman. We were in first class & got kicked out. Felt incredibly stupid, and then the odd part was that we thought the 2nd class seats were nicer. Anyways, I found my seat number and sat down. About 10 minutes later, a lady came by & started talking to me in French. Turns out I had the right seat number, wrong car number... Whoops. Luckily the train was not full so she just sat in another seat in the same car. Crisis averted as it would have been a pain to have to drag my luggage out & into another car. A luggage porter would be real handy right about now!

I got off the train in Lyon & meandered thru the streets, eventually finding the hotel. It is about 90 degrees here. And there is no a/c in our hotel. So it's HOT. I actually ended up taking 3 showers yesterday - morning, afternoon, and evening. Pretty sure that is going to be a ritual for me while I am here since we wil be doing quite a bit of walking.

The front desk was closed from 1-3 on weekends (random?) so I hung out in one of the other students' rooms. I walked in to see this room that looks like a sitting room. I was like - sweet - this is huge & it's just the sitting room!!!

Wrong, Lisa. What looks like a couch is actually a bed with a stow-a-way bed underneath! But our room is actually bigger than most people's so I have room to pull it out & set it up perpendicular to my roommate, Adrianne's. I must say, I couldn't have a better roommate. Adrianne and I like 2 peas in a pod! She's not a morning person, is an avid reader, likes to have a clean/organized room, and best of all - she also LOVES nothing more than a Mountain Dew at 8 in the a.m. So we can both commiserate over the fact that they don't have Mt Dew here. So I am officially weened off of Mt Dew since it's not available to me... I hoping to not pick up the habit when I return to MSP!

After unpacking & taking my 2nd shower of the day, the whole group of Carlson students headed out to find our school. I didn't get a chance to find a map, and wrongfull assumed that someone knew where they were going. Yah, not at all. We wandered around for quite awhile. What should have been a 25 min walk tooks us about, oh, and hour & 15 minutes. It's kind of funny that my first time getting lost was when I was with a group of 20 people. I actually navigated our way back & we got back to our hotel in about 25 minutes. So for once in my life, I seem to have a sense of direction. Can't tell you how odd this is. Oh, and while we were lost, we walked thru THE scariest square. It must be the hangout for homeless people or something? They were gathered all over this place & then there were piles upon piles of dirty, rolled up clothes all over the place. I am glad that I was in this square w/ 20 other people and not by myself! I definitely won't be exploring that area any more!

Our group went out for dinner and after that, we headed back to our rooms to look over the maps and figure what the best way to get to the school actually was. Orientation starts tomorrow, so with a full day ahead of us, we went to bed early!