We've struck up a bit of a friendship with an older French woman who lives in our apartment complex. She frequently ends up waiting for/on the bus at the same time that we do, and we have talked a bit about Lyon and France. She says that Lyon is, in her opinion, more closed and that it's harder to meet people than in many other cities. She has lived here for years but didn't want to move here initially, when her husband got a job here.
Today, I took the kids -- who are on All Saints break, which is two weeks long -- to the Beaux Arts museum in Lyon. On the way home, our neighbor boarded the bus and sat nearby, chatting. I mentioned that we were taking advantage of our vacation time to explore more of Lyon and she smiled knowingly and said, "Oh, yes, there are certainly a lot of vacations in France, aren't there?" I said, "Well, it seems like there are more than in the United States..." She said, "Oh, everyone knows that Americans work very very hard. And French people do like their vacations. That is well-known, too!"
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