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Published: August 31st 2010
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The headquarters of Airbus is in Toulouse, France and was the stop for a quick visit and overnight stay. Airbus's biggest pride and joy right now is the A380 (just like Boeing has the 787). Airbus does all the final assembly in Toulouse where they have a enormous air strip and plants that all the planes get assembled, inspected, and delivered from. Many of the part come from several different areas of Europe, and must be shipped to Toulouse. I found it very impressive the methods of which they must employ in order to get the fuselage to the plant. The fuselage is too big to be brought in by train which most other parts of delivered by. Instead, the different part of the fuselage, which are made around Europe, are picked up on several barges and then shipped to a port near Toulouse. Once they arrive there, they are loaded on to specially made trucks that can handle their super wide body. When loaded, the trucks take up nearly the entire road, so they can only travel at night, when they close down the entire highway to the plant. Except along the highway, there is one very small town that
the trucks must pass through with about a meter or two of clearance on either side from hitting buildings. They must use very precise GPS when going through the town just so they don't hit anything. And this process takes place every two weeks or so! The pictures and video they showed us of this were pretty neat, but I can't find on the Internet to show you.
Anyways, the tour was somewhat interesting but not that exciting as most of the work had stopped for the weekend when we got there around five in a Friday afternoon. We got to see the final assembly plant and three A380's in progress, footage and raw data from the first A380 flights, as well as tour a life size mock up of the A380 cabin. Airbus is betting that the future of air travel will demand for more luxury and options on long haul flights (while Boeing is betting that efficiency is what is going to be demanded with the 787). Therefore, within the planes, airlines have the option of small cafes, casinos, lounges, as well as showers or personal cabins for first class. To date they have 234 confirmed orders
Place for Dinner
We ate inside on the second floor that we had to ourselves with 90 delivered. This includes a order for a prince of some royalty (they wouldn't tell us who) who ordered a personal jet which lists for 347 million Euros! Overall the planes were quite nice, but still... it's just a plane.
That night, after checking into the hotel, I did a marathon walking tour of Toulouse by myself. It is a Roman city meaning lots of brick and small streets. It sits between the Mediterranean and Atlantic and features canals that bring water between the two. Around the canal was a great area for student night life and overall there was just a lot of people hanging about the city. One park featured live African music with lots of people dancing. It was very pleasant to be around.
I got legitimately lost for the first time in a very long time while there. I blame it on the map, but it may have just been that I failed to note where I started from and could not remember the street our hotel was on for the life of me. Opps! It wouldn't have been a big deal other than the fact that we had a very nice dinner
Our Duck Dinner
Sitting next to me, closest to the camera, is Yolanda, who is one of the housing coordinators and the one who gave us the "penthouse" in Geneva. in the main plaza that I had to get back for. Never fear though, I made it back (after jogging for the last 5 minutes once I figured out where I had to go) and even though I was a sweaty mess, was really able to enough a delicious duck meal at a nice restaurant in the main plaza where we had the second (air conditioned) floor to ourselves. The duck was very rare and required all the muscled I had to cut it, but I have to say that I quite enjoyed it.
During the course of dinner, I also learned that our program director Paul (who is THE MAN), had recently visited Santa Clara. I asked him how he liked it and he said it was beautiful and that the people were really nice and all. (the next part is for any fellow SCU readers) But he said he was quite disgusted by yellow house yet enjoyed the Hut. (yellow house is a rather grungy house known for parties and the hut is the primary student bar). I had to laugh and asked him how he had managed to find those places. Apparently, he was there over
parents weekend, and was invited by one of the guys in yellow house to party, thinking he was a parent of one of his friends. So Paul went, had a great time and then proceeded to go with them to the Hut for shots. It was too funny... especially since Paul is like 50 years old, from Ireland, and the essence of class... totally not Yellow house.
INTERESTING FACT: Toulouse is very close to a town called Nim, where a special blue flower grows that was first used to make denim. Denim actually means "of or from Nim".
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