Can you believe that one can take pictures like this on a bus??
Incredible
We made one short coffee and chocolatine stop and we eventually rolled into Toulouse- "The Pink City" as it has been nicknamed for its red brick buildings. It was around 12p when we pulled in, so the first thing we did was take all of our baggage to the hotel's storage room and then head to lunch.
All of us crammed into the baggage storage room!
Our hotel
Lunch time!
We ate at a great and chic local joint called "Chez Jules" (Jules' Place) where we had three courses: a yummy tomato salad, a mouth-watering saucy chicken and mashed potatoes dish, and a divine chocolate mousse dessert. It was fabulous.
Our salad
My table! From left: Joseph, Alexis (silent "s"), Jenna, Me, Aleca, Gavin, Tyler, and Steve's forehead
Chez Jules
Our main course... OMG!
Our dessert!
After lunch, we headed as a group to the nearby Office of Tourism to get maps and pickup our tour guides for the next hour and a half. We were split into two groups- french speaking or english speaking- and since the groups had to be even, a lot of us who wanted to be in the french group were made to go in the english speaking group. That was me... darn. At least we were going to understand every little bit of the tour!
We all fell in love with this city...
Just to the left of this building is the Office of Tourism... not bad huh?
We hung out here for a little bit while we waited for our maps and we mostly spent the time in the sun. Some even whipped out the frisbee and got to work on having fun.
Gorgeous Toulouse
Then it was tour time. We walked through the courtyard of Toulouse's Capitole (City Hall) building, saw the massive Occitan Cross that is engraved on the ground in front of it, saw a ceiling of about 150 paintings that depict Toulouse's history, saw the largest Romanesque church in Europe, and more.
The courtyard of the Capitole. I felt like I was back in Italy...
City Hall
Now you see why it is called "The Pink City!" Back in the day, Toulouse was constructed completely out of bricks because it was a poor city. However, Toulouse was also a main stop on the largest trade route in Southern France, so it wanted to represent itself as a rich city. The bricks of Toulouse's buildings were then covered in chalk to resemble the marble of wealthy cities. During WWII, there were spikes in national pride all over the world and spikes in regional pride all over France. Toulouse began to see that its architecture was unique. It became proud of its red bricks and refused to leave them covered. Toulouse has been "The Pink City" ever since.
Still standing outside of the Capitole: there is a giant Occitan Cross imprinted in the ground in metal. It is believed that the four sections of the star represent the four seasons and the three points in each section represent the months of that season. If this is the case, this might be Leo (mine, my dad's, and my brother's sign).
Across the way from the Capitole there is a strip of restaurants and boutiques that are covered by a gorgeous art display: a ceiling depicting Toulouse's history. The first painting you see in the picture illustrates red brick pride.
Next we kept on our walking tour. We passed by a few truly gorgeous sights, and we couldn't have had better weather to appreciate them.
Notre-Dame du Taur, 14th century bell tower
Lovely streets <3
The Basilica of St. Sernin, 1080-1120; it is the oldest Romanesque style church in Europe and has what is considered the most beautiful pipe organ in France inside
The bell tower: the curved arches on the bottom two levels are rounded in the Romanesque style; the top two levels have pointed arches in the Gothic style (these were added later)
Toulouse had more money when this was built so they were able to add white stone. But, they also kept the brick as well, being that it was so pretty
Happy, fun day! (Don't mind the woman who totally just blasted through my picture)
Inside the basilica are the feet of Saints Sernin and Christopher (the Saint of Travelers). Travelers have been coming to this church for centuries to touch Saint Christopher's feet to be blessed in their travels... we touched them too.
Inside the church
Then it was on to the Church of the Jacobins; so named after a group of Dominican Catholics known as "Jacobins" because they originated from "Jacques" street. This church also houses half of the remains (the left side and head) of St. Thomas Aquinas.
And in we go...
This is the ceiling of the church. And you are seeing this picture with me looking straight down at the ceiling above me.... it was kind of like Alice in Wonderland. There was a perfect, massive mirror around the base of the main pillar of the church, and that allows you to get a good look at the palm tree effect of the veins on the ceiling, as well as a view of the windows as they change colors....
So the entire church consists of one single nave (large hall) and no side wings. There is a row of massive pillars down the center to split the church in half (back in the day, there were curtains in between the pillars to block the view of the Jacobins from the "believers," as our tour guide called them). On the left side of the pillars, you have heat; on the right, cold. At the far end of the church there is the beginning of hot (pictured above) and the beginning of cold, side by side. The windows slowly fade from hot to cold all the way around the church.
Lastly, we stepped outside into the beautiful cloister to see the bell tower and garden. This tower is the reason the basilica's was added on to- when this was built, it was taller than the one over at the basilica, and that just would not do.
A beautiful place to be
Ahhhhhhhh =)
And then we were free to explore! Today just happened to be the birthday of two girls in USAC and they wanted to go buy some beers from a nearby grocery store and take them down to the river. About half of our USAC group ended up deciding to do this too and it was the perfect way to spend the afternoon. The 20 or so of us bought our beers and started walking towards the river. This is what we saw:
Lots of Toulousians out enjoying the sunshine with drinks, or guitars, or cigarettes, or bathing suits, or however it was they wanted to enjoy their day. It was beautiful!
The famous Toulouse bridge and the strip of park next to it
We walked a little further to a bigger park, found a shady spot, and spent the next 3 hours (at least) sitting on the grass, playing frisbee, laughing, and enjoying the gorgeous day.
And off we go!
Loving life
Cheers!
I totally played!!
I think this will remain one of my favorite afternoons from my entire France experience. We had so much fun and were feeling so full of life today.
In this picture, you get a sense of how fearless we were all feeling at this point: Carl decided that he could jump over Gavin's head, and found out that this isn't so. Please tell me you don't love the presence of the frisbee in this picture???
Around 7:30p we split up to go get ready for dinner. I went back to mine, Aleca, Jenna, and Sarah's room to get ready with the first two girls (our roommate Sarah was doing her own thing). Around 8:30p we headed to the dinner spot: Pizza Pino! We were totally jazzed to go have some more fun on this incredible day but were immediately sucked dry of our good vibes when we showed up at the restaurant to find that literally everyone else in the group had sat down at two long tables and had already ordered drinks. There was no room for us at those tables either. Needless to say, we were irritated. We felt like we had been totally shrugged off as if we didn't matter and it made us feel unwanted by the group. We went and sat at a nearby table for the three of us but it was far enough away that we couldn't even participate in the conversation. We were fuming for a little while and taking turns giving the whole, "what does it matter; let's not let it ruin our day; who cares, we'll have more fun this way anyways," speech when our food arrived. After that, I don't even remember when the bad vibes went away- all I remember is that Aleca, Jenna, and I had such good, intense, fun, and interesting conversation that I completely forgot those other people were even there. Like I was surprised when they started walking up to our table to say they were heading out at the end of dinner. "When did you get here?" I remember thinking.
My dinner: carbonara with ham!
The three of us took our time enjoying a couple of glasses of wine and then having some coffee before heading out. We were chatted up by just about every male waiter in the place so we were feeling pretty smug when we left. The cold shoulder by the rest of the group was all but forgotten! When we were done at the restaurant, we strutted our stuff back to the hotel to join everyone in someone's room for a very loud gathering of obnoxious not-quite-21-year-olds-in-France. Aiya. Needless to say, it wasn't long before the front desk manager came up to tell us to shut up or go out. I had me a small glass of vodka and coke made by the lovely Aleca but I barely got to finish it before we kicked ourselves out on the town. The next stop was a nearby bar for which we ladies had coupons to to get free Sangria! The bar had about 6 other people inside so we weren't that keen on staying, but we did get our free Sangria and it was really really good. Afterwards, we joined the whole group at the park we were at earlier today to be noisy and just have a good time. There were a lot of open beers floating around so our volume level began to draw some attention: probably ESPECIALLY when others noticed we were speaking English. I kid you not, we could have charged admission for the crowd of random large men we attracted. I don't know what was so interesting about a group of 25 not-so-sober Americans but they started surrounding us like we were circus animals. A few of us (Aleca, Tyler, myself, and a couple of others) started noticing the weirdness of the whole thing and moved ourselves to the outside of the mosh pit. That was when we realized that our group was slowly being surrounded by more and more strangers wanting to chat us up and was little by little being pushed back into the park benches. Well, that was enough of that! We split up, dove into the group, gave everyone we passed the subtle but very serious warning that we were leaving right now and they needed to come with, and then gathered whoever chose to leave and started walking. Phew! No one seemed to be robbed, hurt, or drugged so I'm thinking we made it out of there just in time.
The next thing we did, was walk our whole party all the way back to the river to check out the bars in that area. That seemed to be where the party was at, but it was so packed that we couldn't fit our whole group into a single one of them! Us ladies, though, formed a single file line holding hands and slithered our way to the back of one bar to use the bathroom. After that, we all sat outside on the wall overlooking the river and laughed and goofed off for a little while. Eventually, we were too freezing to sit there any longer and started walking back the way we came. And that's when we came across it: the epic.... the amazing.... SPINNY THING! Ladies and gentlemen, us fully grown college students spent the next hour and a half taking turns cramming onto a large, tilted bowl-shaped toy to be spun until we were in pain or couldn't breath from being smothered by other bodies. I do not know why this was so appealing, but it was, in a way, one of the funnest things I've ever done. This probably has to do with where I was and who I was with.... and knowing that our time here is coming to an end. It sort of felt like a celebration of life. Around 2a, we headed back to the hotel to crash. The next day we were heading to Carcassonne and we were leaving early. I went to bed tonight a very happy girl, indeed. =)
No comments:
Post a Comment