Trotinettes

Lyon has an efficient and modern public transport network of underground, tram and bus lines. It also has an excellent city bike scheme, Vélo'v, which has been in operation since 2005 as a public-private partnership between the city and advertising company JCDecaux, with 350 hiring stations throughout the city and some 3000 bicycles which you can rent for just €1.50 for 24 hours (provided you change bicycles every 30 minutes). 

Transport operator TCL also has an extremely handy iPhone app which not only calculates journey times on public transport from any point in the city, but provides real-time information about where Vélo'v stations are located and - more importantly - how many bicycles and bike parking spaces are available at each.

But the real people-mover in Lyon in the literal sense of the word is the humble scooter, or trotinette, as it is known in French. Light, portable, collapsible and practical, the scooter has become far more than a children's plaything on the streets of Lyon.

Lyonnais mystery no. 1

An odd collection of buildings on the corner of Avenue Rockefeller and Boulevard Pinel in the 8th arrondissement presented me with my first Lyonnais mystery. Squat, rectangular and almost windowless, these three strange, flat-roofed buildings seemed so out of place, so different from the surrounding architecture, that they immediately drew my attention. 

 I'd first noticed them when I looked out of my hotel window. There, at the far end of a fenced-off sort of no-man's-land of tall grass next to the Grand Mosque in the Quartier Mermoz, stood three tall buildings, each about the length and breadth of a football pitch and two floors high, with what looked like watchtowers and aerial walkways running between them. Each was very different in its own way, though they clearly belonged together. But what the Guignol could they be?

Hôtel-Dieu

Like a dowager reclining on the banks of the river while her grandchildren frolic in the water, a once-stunning princess whose best days are long since behind her, the massive Hôtel-Dieu sprawls along the west side of the presque-île; the wedge of land in the centre of Lyon at the tip of which the city's two rivers, the Rhone and Saône, merge. For although it is one of the largest buildings in Lyon, it goes largely unnoticed by the people, cars and even the waters that rush by this locked and shuttered behemoth.