Rue des Deux Epees (Two Sword Street), Rues des Chats-Bossus (Hunchbacked Cats Road), Place des Oignons (Onion Place), Rue du Bleu Mouton (Blue Sheep Road)…if there’s one thing you can say about Lille, it’s that the street names and architecture will give you no end of distraction.
Well, it was fun while it lasted but the end of a small era is drawing to a close – that of my first experience living in the dead centre of a city (I’ve only lived rurally or in the nearby suburbs of a city before) and it has been fantastic – especially as a cyclist/pedestrian.
Despite the godawful rising damp that is slowly transforming my ground level apartment into a swamp (I have, let’s count them, a grand total of six dehumidifiers around the bedroom right now), living here has been a little piece of magic. So while my lungs will thank me in the long run, it’s still with a tinge of regret that I bid my little art nouveau stained glass apartment cave adieu. I won’t be too far away, only a few kilometres from downtown Lille, but there’s something about stepping straight out of your front door into the thrum of city life that can’t be beat.
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