Blogs from Toulouse, Midi-Pyrénées, France, Europe - page 5

Travel Blog - France #2 Okay I will return to my pre-France adventures with Maura next entry (I am writing it now) but I wanted to update you all on France and the goings on here, so I’ll talk about my first few weeks in France. Typical French-ness at work as I will show you here: Typicality 1: Can’t get a stamp when I enter the country. Of course I have to go to 3 different offices at the airport just to find this out (all of those before say they are sure I can get one if I just go to the next office). I am not too surprised by this since it is part of the Schengen space but whatever I wanted to try anyway to perhaps make the visa process easier. Typicality 2: ... read more

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 ... read more

A bit after 3am on Saturday the 31st, Halloween morning, we 3 American Palau residents got out of bed and gathered our belongings for the day's journey first to Toulouse, 3 hours away by bus, and then to Nice, another 6 or so hours via train. At a quarter to 5 we met our 4th traveling companion at the bus station and promptly boarded our Novatel shuttle. After a little less than 3 hours of half-sleeping and bobbling our heads every which way in darkness, we arrived in Toulouse. We hadn't anticipated being able to make the 8:17am train and instead opted for the noon-ish one, but realistically we could have made the earlier one given the demonic/rapid pace the driver took. That being said, we now had some 4 hours of kill in the city ... read more

We recently visited Sarlat, which at only 2.5 hours drive from Toulouse, and discovered a typical regional French medieval village. Sarlat has one of the most beautiful open air markets of France, and is reknown for this. Hard to choose amongst all the types of fresh sausages, from duck meat sausage to porc sausage with truffle, or from porc sausage with roquefort to porc sausage with wild mushrooms. So the only thing is to try them all!!!! You have an incredible choice of walnuts all prepared in different ways, truffles, truffle oils, mushrooms, duck liver (foie gras). A truely incredible shopping experience for both the cronic household chef to the occassional weekend pot roast warrior. Visit, taste and enjoy!... read more

Being in Toulouse is not to lose but to win by a Lot! A picture paints 1000 words and we have many of this terracotta city. Byzantine ceilings, French painters and streetscapes galore ... blended with warm days and nights ... lends itself to cafe sitting and postcard writing or people gazing ... Toulouse is an architectural feast with lots of narrow streets and loads of character at every turn. Whether it be a fancy street lamp, the relief the flat terracotta bricks create or the vaulted ceilings featuring a particular design era the town had us gazing in awe and snapping our little Olympus devices ad nauseum. Half timbered houses, shuttered windows and doors and tiered roof tops demanded our attention. We walked many of the streets (don't our feet know it!) and then rested ... read more