Yesterday we got woken up pretty early by our darling son. Normally he is an early bird, but with the summer-winter time switch he becomes an almost nocturnal bird.

While having breakfast I was looking outside and noticing the weather was not as bad as predicted, so I proposed to go quickly out somewhere. So we set off for Lille, a city in the north of france that was cultural capital of Europe in 2004, also known as Rijsel in dutch.

As the only queue yesterday were at the graveyards we arrived there pretty quickly to discover that

• the city was pretty much as quiet as you would expect on a national holiday
• people where coming with shopping from a certain direction

Following the trickle of shoppers we found a gigantic shopping center next to the central station of Lille that was open (!). A good thing too as the weather turned bad and it started raining.

So we spend some time window-shopping until the rains stopped and we resumed walking around the city. All in all a nice shopping place, the french were a lot friendlier then I expected and I actually managed to speak french within seconds of speaking italian (normally I start off in french but quickly crossover to italian).