Sports

Firstly say that France is a country where sport is part of the life, there are lots of football (soccer) and rugby followers; also the Tour de France is the event of the summer (except of course if there is a Eurocup or summer olympic games...). But they don't only watch sports, many of the people I know here do some exercise, mostly running, swimming and football.

Picture by maté de fournoux

I can say that I am a quite active person, I've practiced as many sports as I could in my life, I like testing them, I find it very amusing and relaxing. Just before moving here I used to do quite a lot of swimming, some gym training, some running and a bit of mountain biking; so you can understand the frustration I felt when I realised there was no swimming pool near my house nor a place to use my bike... At least I could continue running (as much as work and winter weather allowed me). Another thing that was not easy to find was a salle de sport (as gym is a different thing here). There are very few in Lyon and all of them are surprisingly deceiving as many don't have staff to help you, most open only during office hours, some have only recorded collective activities with no coach... In the end I decided to go to a new one that follows the low cost concept, it's reaaally simple but it's as cheap as 19,90€ per month.

Picture by mII

What I haven't explored much but that seems to be quite popular here are the clubs, you can find clubs for every sport and it seems that it's what people prefer rather than gyms; I guess it must be good to find people with the same interests; I should try it soon.

La Croix Rousse

The Croix-Rousse is a hill in Lyon as well as the neighborhood located on the same, basically it covers a small part of the 1st arrondissement and all the 4th. We were taken by our french friends for the first time not long after our arrival and we loved the charm of this area, it is quite different from the rest of the city, its buildings and streets are quite unique and you can notice it from the moment you step out of the cog railway that takes you to the top. In fact it is nowadays the chic district of the city, but this situation is quite new as it used to be a working-class area.

 

 

Its architecture is really original, deeply determined by its past as a key place for the silk industry; the appartments have very high celings and big windows due to the enormous looms they had to accomodate when they were conceived. But this is not the only particularity, there are a lot of passageways accross the buildings, the traboules, which were created by the weavers to carry their bolts of silk down to the Presqu'íle, they had a double mission, shorten the way and protect the goods from the elements. Now they are opened to the public at least between 8h and 19h thanks to an agreement with the city, and they are a mandatory visit if you come to Lyon as it is a very rare and different concept; if you do it you may find interesting this app of augmented reality for finding the traboules, I have it and it worths the 0,79€ it costs; otherwise you can follow the signals that are all around the neighborhood and that indicate the points of interestests, traboules included.

 

The last reason why you shouldn't miss la Croix-Rousse from your visit is because of its breathtaking sights of Lyon, as it is the tallest point together with the Fourvière you can see the whole city, simply amazing.

 

People

Picture by Carlinow

It's been already a month since I arrived to Lyon and I guess I start to have a brief idea of the different types of people you can find around here. In terms of nationalities, in Madrid you can normally see a lot of people from South America, a few Moroccan and a few Chinese people, however in Lyon I think there is a wider variety but with a clear predominance of North Africans. Something quite shocking about this population is that a lot of them continue to wear their regional clothes (burqa, veil, etc.) which are completely different from the occidental way of dressing.

Apart from this visual shock, the experience with the people has been very good. In general everybody has been very kind and we had no problem with anybody for any moment. The people here seem to like the foreigners and they try to understand you and even to talk to you in English if they see you straggling with French. However the general feeling is that you are in a big city, so don't expect unknown people starting long conversations with you on the street, people is busy and always in a hurry.

The move

I'm already in Lyon! But it haven't been easy!

We planned to do everything in around three weeks, which looked enough for a first settling in, and it was, what we didn't know at that moment is the big effort it supposed to get there.

Our first week was in Madrid in order to separate the things we wanted to keep in the house, the things that we wanted the moving agency to take and the things that we wanted to carry ourselves in the car. It didn't suppose too many problems really, the guys of AGS were very professional, they spent a full day to pack everything with care and after we were ready to take the car and go!

We tried to have a relaxed trip so we stopped in Barcelona which is just in the middle of the way to Lyon. There we have good friends and we enjoyed a great dinner with them. The next day was most of the road trip in France, many highways to pay, but no issues reported.

The arrival was the moment to clean the apartment and to paint some walls (as it was too white for us!!), just after we had to buy all the missing furniture and all the appliances. These were very busy days! The good thing is that it gave us the possibility to start getting in touch with the shops, malls, etc.

Still, the worst part was about to come when we had to assemble all the furniture from IKEA (1.2 tons!!) and to set up the appliances in a badly designed kitchen furniture... For the IKEA thing we finally had to hire two guys to assemble a big part of them as it was far too much to do in the time we had left.

Finally the result of the move was a beautiful and ready-to-use apartment and the balcony packed with empty boxes.

Negotiating

I have mentioned before about the painful process to get a formal proposal from my company, however when it finally arrived I was not able to negotiate much, it was a pretty standard expat contract and there was not a lot of margin. Basically:

• Money for a house
• Relocation agency to find a house
• Yearly travel allowance
• Settle in bonus
• International medical insurance
• Car loan with very low interest
• Finance advice for the taxes

In my case I had some constraints to travel with my husband at the same time, so I negotiated an extra travelling allowance for the first months in order to have the possibility to see each other every weekend. This last condition was easy to get, however the amounts of the different standard conditions were very much fixed and there was no option to change a comma.

The beginning

Picture by Lucy Nieto

Basically it all started in December 2009, when the boss of my boss offered me a change of job, an upgrade after 2 years and 6 months working for the company. I accepted with no doubts, the only possible issue was that at that time it was not clear if the position was in Madrid or in Paris. They told me the new job was depending on a project and that I would be slowly taking it over in the next months. It was true in terms of work, but not true in terms of clarity on my future destination and there were also many issues in the middle that ended up with new people on board and with a formalization that happened only in March 2011 (yes, one year and 4 months after...). 

The result of all this was that I was finally moving to Lyon in France!! 

Introduction

Hello everybody, my name is Javi and I'm here to tell the story of what is happening to me since the last few months.

I've been given an expat assignment and I'll be moving from Madrid to Lyon shortly.

I will be explaining what are the main phases I've been through, try to give the best tips for you if you face a similar situation and also explain how does the life in Lyon look like.

I wish I'm constant enough to meet my objectives!!

PS: Sorry for the mistakes I'll centainly do in my texts, unfortunately I'm not a native english speaker...