Vielle Lille: Why don’t I have a sense of direction?

I spent hours this morning trying to orient myself to the streets in Lille. Can’t say I did a great job. Part of the difficulty is using French maps. The other part might be between my ears. Eventually we felt prepared to attempt the 2km walk from our apartment to Vielle (old) Lille. A supposed 40 minute leisurely walk took about 90 minutes. Part of the problem is my inability to program maps well, but another difficulty is the intersections without signage. Beyond that I feel as though I have become directionally challenged to a degree I am unfamiliar with.

We did make it to Vielle Lille, coming in onto the Charles De Gaulle Plaza, this is his hometown. The area is full of grand buildings and a number of them are pictured here. Also, a lot of people. Sheila told me repeatedly she had never been around such a concentration of people. Below you will see pictures of their Notre Dame Cathedral. It stuck out for its grandeur, but also for having an incongruent modern facade, pictured first. I seem to run into a picture formatting challenge and can no longer put three pictures on a line. Consequently, I added a fourth picture, not of Notre Dame.

Vielle Lille is a maze of streets that are assuredly not on a grid. I was challenged to know where I was going and where I had been. I was a bit surprised that there was a fair amount of newer construction, and an extreme amount of commercial enterprise, much of which was duplicative. Still the older buildings were incredibly ornate and challenged our brains to understand how they were constructed. Below are a few more pictures of what we saw.

We eventually decided to attempt to walk back home more efficiently than we had arrived at the old town. We hesitated often, hemmed and hawed, and asked for advice a couple of times. Twice I let Sheila dictate our path in the face of my uncertainty, and we did it! We walked home efficiently and had a reprise of last night’s dinner.

We expect to take a train to Bruges in Belgium tomorrow. This had not been on the itinerary, but we met a man from Bruges while on the train from London to Lille. Alex sat across from our table on the London to Lille train. He wore earplugs hooked into his phone with a book of Debussy sheet music in front of him. He got off the phone about 20 minutes before arrival. We had been noticing he had extremely long fingers that had been moving along with the music in the book. I asked if he was a pianist to which he laughed. I told him my mom had been a piano teacher and if she had met him she would have told him he should play piano. He responded he is also a teacher, but also performs jazz influenced classical piano concerts. For the rest of the journey the three of us had a sparkling conversation and he convinced us we have to see Bruges which is only about an hour away from Lille. So, for now I am off to bed to dream about the fairy tale city of Bruges.