Our first visitors & a visit to the zoo

In July my cousin Cameron and his girlfriend Moana came to stay with us for a couple days as our first official guests. At the end of January James and I had met up with Cam in Banff where he's lived for over five years. Since he knew he was going to be in Europe to see Moana we had a tentative plan to meet up and it worked out! They were doing a little European road trip before Moana had to go back to university in Austria and they came to visit us in Lyon on their way back to her parents' house in Germany. 

We had a chilled out Sunday afternoon/evening with drinks and dinner on the balcony before a solid night of sleep. They had mostly been camping in their van so they were pretty pumped at seeing the futon in our living room!

The next day we headed out after lunch for quite the trek around the city. We started out in Vieux Lyon, made our way up many-a-stair to Croix Rousse where we stopped for a beer, then carried on down some more epic steps to stroll the banks of the Saône, and finishing up with a visit to the Parc de la Tête d'Or to check out the impressive (and free) zoo.

The zoo has so many different animals you can't quite believe you're in Lyon. Above the photo of the bear (who was relieving himself when I took it - apologies) is a photo of the former cage they used to display bears in at the zoo. Pretty shocking to think about how awfully the animals were treated back then, though even today I feel unsure about animals on display outside of their natural environments. One thing I will say for this zoo is that it is in a humongous park and doesn't really feel overly artificial for the large animals. Feel free to check out the (French) website: http://www.zoo.lyon.fr/zoo/

We were completely exhausted after walking all day so we took some naps to recuperate. Then after eating some dinner we headed out to a social meetup that James and I have been going to most Monday nights which is put on by Couchsurfing.org. This site is kind of like a mix between AirBnB and Facebook in the sense that you can host travelers or find couches to sleep on but also hear about social events and other things happening in the city. James and I have met a lot of people through CS and since there is always a mix of French people and foreigners it was perfect to bring Cam and Moana to. Cam got to practice his French from back in the day, Moana met another German girl from a place near her hometown and as usual, we enjoyed some cold ones. Great visit, maybe we'll do it again next summer!