Bon voyage!

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For the last three days of my Reading Week, I went to visit my cousin Marianna, wholives in Toulouse, in southwest France. Nine years ago, when she was a junior studying abroad like me, she studied in Montpelier and fell in love. Ever since then, she’s worked on and off in France, and she and her husband have lived in Toulouse for the past two years. He’s an atmospheric physicist (he studies weather patterns) and she makes websites and does other communications work for the French space agency. Her husband’s name is Paul, and he’s from Corse (Corsica), like Napoleon. The two of them are so cute. They’ve been to our house a few times for Christmas, and my mother remarked that she really enjoyed Paul’s facial expressions and expressive gestures (“Gallic shrugs,” as Agatha Christie always writes about Hercule Poirot) - since French has so few words, native speakers naturally put a lot of nuance into everything they say. I definitely agree with her, it’s very fun to watch.

Getting to Toulouse was rather complicated. St Andrews has a Student Travel Agency office right in the student union, so I asked them to find me the cheapest flights and transportation to and from the airport. First, I had to take the 6:35 bus from St Andrews to Leuchars. That meant leaving the dorm at 6:15 and lugging my suitcase over wet sidewalks in the dark. Then, the Leuchars bus stop was right next to the train station, so I caught a train to Edinburgh. From the Edinburgh bus stop, I took a shuttle to the airport, then I caught the 10:50 plane to Amsterdam. Finally, I flew from Amsterdam to Toulouse. It was pretty interesting flying over the Netherlands - it must be even flatter than Arkansas, and it’s covered with little lakes and rivers. It definitely looks like it could flood at any moment. Flying across to France, I also got to see the Black Mountains.

The Amsterdam airport was so funny - I had thought that all of the signs would be in Dutch, with English and maybe one or two other languages listed underneath. Nope. EVERYTHING, even the billboards, was in English! It's not Double-Dutch at all! Only the signs at passport control had any Dutch on them, in small, pale writing. It must be awful for local passengers. Later, my mother told me that she’s read a few books by an author from the Netherlands who now lives in London, and his characters are constantly talking about how much they hate Dutch, how ugly and guttural it is, and how they’d rather speak English. Of course, the Toulouse airport was the complete opposite. Most of the signs had the English listed below the French, but especially when flying out, I noticed that announcements over the loudspeaker were only in French. I realized it was time to board my plane back to Amsterdam only because I saw everyone around me getting up and making a “queue” at the gate door.

Marianna was right there at the gate when my plane landed. She drives a typical European car - something that says “Honda Civic” on it but looks more like a 30-year-old Volvo - with manual transmission. We braved French motorway traffic to drive back to her apartment. Actually, the traffic was not bad at all (on Friday, at least. . .) and it was nice to see some real intersections again. Once we got to Toulouse, all the streets became narrow and windy. Marianna’s apartment is on a very cute little street filled with stucco-covered, tile-roofed brick buildings and Turkish kebab restaurants. (Later, one of Marianna’s friends told me that the man who owns the street gives licensing priority to people who want to open kebab restaurants.) Marianna said that Toulouse is one of the few towns in France that builds mostly with bricks; everywhere else uses stone. The bricks and tiles give it a really Mediterranean atmosphere. Her apartment is very cute, although tiny! It just has a bedroom, a kitchen, an all-purpose dining/sitting/guest room, and a bathroom (with a washing machine the size of a microwave! It's so cute!). Their kitchen looks out on a really pretty courtyard filled with exotic-looking trees and flowers.

I can definitely see why she loves France so much. I fell in love with Toulouse right away. First, of course, it’s just pretty. Then, it's very modern, filled with all kinds of upscale trendy shops, and yet it's still like a small community. Marianna walks or rides her bike everywhere, even to work, and she does almost all her shopping at small family-owned businesses. On Saturday, we stopped by a market to get supplies for our picnic and dinner. The owners were an elderly couple. The whole market was about the size of a dorm room, and it was just crammed with wooden bins full of fresh produce. There was a small refrigerated case with meat and dairy products. Quite a few old ladies with those rolling suitcase-style shopping baskets stopped by, and one bought an enormous head of celery - it was seriously two feet long! Marianna said she wants to bring a video camera with her every time she goes there! It would be so much fun to get to shop at places like that all the time.

Also, the Toulouse lifestyle allows you to reduce your ecological impact. Marianna and Paul complained that people in France aren’t very considerate about littering, but at least the government has done a lot to cut back energy waste. Public transportation and biking seem to be really popular, and people have to pay the “real cost” of all the energy they use. For instance, after Paul washed the table cloths, he draped them over chairs to dry because putting them in the dryer would be so expensive. I'm sure it's a pain sometimes, but I think it's important for people to be aware of the damage they're causing. And most of the time, is it really that hard to take the low-energy route? For instance, most college students just leave their music playing all the time, even when they're not in their rooms. They definitely won’t do that once they move out and have to pay for their own electricity. In the same way people would turn off their incandescent light bulbs even if they just left the room for a second, if they really knew how much that time added up. Did you know that visible light is only HALF of the energy produced by an incandescent bulb? The rest is heat. Fifty percent effectiveness, that's pretty pathetic. Anyway, that was kind of a digression, but Toulouse made me realize all over again that living an ecologically-friendly lifestyle doesn't have to mean going backward.

After we dropped my luggage off at the apartment, we headed out to explore Toulouse. First, we walked to the Pont Neuf, a really picturesque bridge that crosses the River Garonne. By this time it was dark, and the bridge and river were lit up. We also strolled through the town, looking at all the different Places (town squares with fountains or little parks). We also stopped into two shops. We went to an adorable little bakery and got pastries, and then we went to a clothes store. I was looking for a hat, but mostly I just wanted to see the new trends! There were lots of pashmina scarves, long socks and stockings, and argyle sweaters.

After a while, Paul got off work and met us. In France, people generally start work around 9:00, have a two-hour lunch break in the middle of the day, and stop working around 7:00. So they eat dinner one or two hours later. That was kind of strange for me - I love to snack at that time of day, but it's hard to eat a full meal! But the food definitely awakened my appetite. We went to a restaurant called Le Poil du Herisson (the quill of the hedgehog). It was built in an old wine cellar, so the walls and ceiling were formed by a brick arch. It was decorated with really interesting, kind of primitive-looking art, such as a giant network of tree branches with coloured paper in between. That one reminded me of a really awkward kite, but Paul suggested that it was supposed to look like sails. I had a “pintade” (guinea fowl) in a pastry crust with a Basque tomato and pepper sauce and mushrooms. It was delicious. For dessert, I had crème brûlée flavoured with violets. I wasn't sure what the violets were going to be like (because I've had roses, and they just taste like soap!), but the violets actually had a nice subtle grape flavour.

After dinner, we went back to the apartment and went to bed right away, because we wanted to be up in plenty of time for tomorrow!

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