L

Lille: Place des Patiniers

Lille: Eglise Rue Pont Neuf

As we've said so many times, our preferred mode of travel is non-travel: we look for an apartment and get to know a city very well. Whatever city it is, we hunker down and don't leave it until our lease is up. So it went in Moscow, Athens,and Sydney. We didn't want it to be any different in Paris (and it wasn't our first two stays in Veronica's place). But this time the temptation was too great.

But Dinah and Mick persuaded us to join them in Lille. They'd already stayed with us in Paris and wanted something new. For them, with the Eurotunnel and train, Lille was just a few hours from London and they thought a few days break would be great. For us, with the TGV, it turned out that Lille was just an hour away from the Gare du Nord (which, with low traffic, we could reach in 25 minutes by bus). So persuaded (and helped along by a gift in honor of Jan's birthday) we went for two days and a night and had a fine time.

Lille is of course small by comparison to Paris or Brussels (of which it reminded us a lot) but there was plenty more to see and do than we could fit into our allotted time. We particularly liked our two meals at a restaurant near the train station (the success of the first meal induced us to return for the second), our walking the streets and just feeling the (semi-recreated) city of two and four centuries ago, and the two big museums we visited: the Hospice Comptesse and the Palais des Beaux Arts.

France