I hitched a ride from Munich to visit my friend Clark in Lyon. So I sat for nine hours in the back of a Volkswagen Golf on what must have been one of the hottest days of the year. My driver had been raving about the galleries of Lyon and Dijon, the other passenger, a seventeen-year-old chain-smoking French girl had been nodding in agreement. Not sure what to expect when I got there and not wanting to get booted out of the car, only to be stuck in a service station near Stuttgart, I agreed that I must see the Cathedral and everything else. I didn’t tell them that I wasn’t really going to see any cultural monuments, so to speak. At least not old ones. I stepped out of the smokey sauna at the metro station Clark had told me about. read the rest