LEAVING LONDON FOR LUNCH IN LILLE (France)

The Euro Star train, which runs under the English Channel, allows Londoners who want to pop over to Paris for lunch to do so. (On the other hand, there may be only one Parisian in the last ten years who has come to London for lunch-except for a business meeting.) But we thought it would be fun to take a Euro Star trip, although not all the way to Paris. Instead we went to Lille, where neither of us had been before.

We took a taxi from our hotel to the St. Pancras train station to catch the EuroStar. This building is the magnificent old London train station that has been and is continuing to undergo refurbishment. In the future the station will have a five-star hotel and luxury apartments. The EuroStar train, like the famous Rocket Train in Japan, is futuristic looking and travels at great speed. It was full both going to France and coming back.

Lille is the fourth largest city in France. It has a tightly contained and very walkable Vieux Lille (the Old Quarter). The buildings are not typical French (as in Paris). They look more like buildings in Belgium or the Netherlands. They are centuries old and have been refurbished or maintained through time.Government buildings are intermixed with shops. Many of the streets are closed to traffic and weave in circular patterns, meeting in huge plazas.

One of real surprises on our walk around were two Catholic Cathedrals we visited. The outside of these buildings looked like they always must have looked. However, inside the first cathedral (a huge one), the main alter apparently had been "decommissioned" and traditional church activities had shrunk to the space used by a small congregation (for example, there was still an area for confessions) . The rest of the huge space was turned over to what looked like performance arts, a children's play area, a dance area, etc. The second church building didn't even maintain a partial church function- - it had been repurposed to a Tourist Bureau.

We walked around the Old Quarter for some time to pick a place to have our Lunch In Lille. We settled on a place in a wonderful old building that was frequented by the locals and had a traditional French/Flemish dish, beef (or chicken) stewed in beer.

All in all, our day in Lille was a great mini-trip to prepare us for the adventures to follow.