Toulouse

I finally made it to Toulouse today and it was jawesome.  I was supposed to go there to meet up with a bunch of other teaching assistants, so I bought my ticket so that I would be there from noon to 5, only to check my email today and see that the meet-up was supposed to happen at 6:30.  Great.  Well anyway, I found the number of a girl I had been e-mailing with, Sam, who is placed in Tarbes but staying in Toulouse for the next few days.  I called her as soon as I got off the train and she came and met me where I was and proceeded to spend the next 4 hours hanging out with me and showing me around the city, which was super nice since I just called her out of the blue, not know whether she may have had plans for the day or whatever.  It turns out that she studied abroad in Toulouse 2 years ago, so she knows the city really well and was happy to show me all the cool things we could see in an afternoon, and tomorrow she's coming here to get oriented at her school and then I'm going to show her around Tarbes, which should take all of about 40 minutes ;)

I was going to put up photos but at the rate they were loading it would have taken about 40 minutes per photo... maybe I'll add them next time.

Anyway, Toulouse is really big (compared to Tarbes), beautiful, and vibrant, full of pretty shops and people and things.  Unlike other french cities like Paris and Bordeaux, which are basically all white, everything in Toulouse is made out of brick, giving it the nickname la ville rose or the pink city.  It was originally part of the Roman empire, so the architecture of the churches is roman and it's full of tiny narrow curvy streets and tons of places or squares.  There are a lot of immigrants there, especially north and west african which are the most prevalent in France in general, and I definitely heard people speaking wolof and saw others that were probably Senegalese although they didn't open their mouths so I couldn't tell for sure.  I thought it would be kind of stupid to only be there for 5 hours but it turned out to be perfect because I didn't see the other assistants, and I figured Sam probably had other things she wanted to do before she moves to Tarbes.  And since it's so easy to get there I can go as often as I want, to discover the rest of the city.  In fact, I'm going next week for the regional teaching assistants' orientation, so I will be there all day and meet all the other assistants but will probably not have much time to explore.  However, one of the Spanish teachers in my school just started teaching this year, so she's only 1 year older than me and went to university in Toulouse and goes back there virtually every weekend, and she invited me to go with her anytime I want to meet her friends and go out in the city.

Tomorrow I go back to Jacque, the tiny village where Anne and Jean Paul live, to hang out with them and start learning how to make quilts from Anne.