Our time for teaching finally ended and we started our three week journey home. We planned to rent a car and drive our way all through southern France on our way to a wedding in Paris. We left Madrid after a painful moving process of many trips on Friday night. We caught the night train from Madrid to Barcelona. In Barcelona, we caught a bus to Toulouse, the city in which we decided to start our journey. Of course, as always, there was a snag that caused some slight worries. The train conducters in Spain decided to have a 24 hour long strike on the day we left so our train was delayed an hour and a half.
The problem was that our bus was leaving two hours after the train got in so we lost a lot of our in between time. We caught a cab up to the bus station with twenty minutes to spare and thought we checked in since we received a piece of paper and were told to go downstairs to look for the bus time and platform. While waiting around, we ran into a friend of ours from Madrid that we had taught with. It was kind of strange to see him there but he had taken the night bus and had recently arrived. He was awaiting his parents for the beginning of their journey around Spain. After a goodbye, we found out where to line up for our bus and headed on over to get in line only to find everyone else holding a different bus ticket and putting sticky tags on their bags. Confused, we asked how to acquire the same things and were told to go upstairs and check in. Funny, we thought we had and why the hell didn't anyone behind the counter say an additional step was involved?
I went back up, stood in the long line again only to be told to go down to the counter that had no line nor a sign saying anything about checking in to get the tags and the bus ticket. Of course, as I'm walking over there, three people jump in the line, the guy gets a phone call, and nothing happens. After ten minutes and a frantic phone call from Iz saying she was getting the driver to wait for a few minutes, I got the stuff and ran out. We loaded up and were on our way. Eight hours later, we arrived in Toulouse.
As a modern city, Toulouse tops one million people and has a large economic base in the aeronautics department as it is home to Airbus, Galileo, SPOT, and also hosts one of Europe's oldest established universities. After some searching, we found our bus and made our way to our hosts' house. The newest part of this trip for us is joining the community of couch surfing. It's an online forum so travelers can meet locals and stay with them instead of being isolated in a hostel or hotel and stuck doing touristy stuff with only the advice of the guy at the counter. We spent the evening getting to know them and went to watch the USA embarrass themselves against Ghana. We had to eat dinner at a fast food type pasta place because for some reason, after 7 p.m. on Saturday night in Toulouse, restaurants only serve drinks and let you bring fast food pasta in to eat.
On Sunday, our hosts took us a to a local market near a church. There were stands of all kinds of fruit, vegetables, and other farm products and we bought some cherries and fresh stinky French cheese. We had lunch at their house made from all the fresh vegetables they bought, a roasted chicken, and our cheeses and wine. Afterwards, we went to a large outdoor swimming pool to relax and take a break from the heat. After our swim, we walked around the town and saw some really amazing stuff. The first thing we saw was an Arc type monument dedicated to the dead of the two World Wars at the end of the street with the beautiful botanical garden and a palace of some sort. Also near the arc monument is the beautiful cathedral of Saint Etienne. This cathedral is odd in comparison with the others we've seen around Europe due to some irregularities in the building design. It seems one direction was taken and later abandoned for another direction. Then, they tried to add on to the church with an even newer design. All of this spanned from the 13th to 16th centuries and makes for an interesting looking church. The inside is beautiful and completely different from the old part to the new part near the west portal. The choir stall is carved from walnut and actually includes mythological and pagan figures. We made our way from the church to the Capitole, the most famous building in Toulouse. As we walked through the streets, we realized its easy to see why Toulouse is called the Rose City because of its color. All the buildings are built from a brick that has a pinkish tint to it.
The Capitole was built almost 900 years ago and was the seat of government there for the Romans when they still ruled the area. We walked up the street from the Capitole when the weather told us we needed to walk along the river if we wanted to see it because a thunderstorm was to arrive soon. We had a lovely walk down the river and saw more amazing architecture like the School of Fine Arts and the infamous Pont Neuf. Originally built in the 1500's, the arches were supposed to look like the mane of lion. You can judge that for yourself.
We spent the rest of our evening hanging out with our hosts and their wonderful friends by having a picnic. At first, we kind of sat apart from all of the French speakers because we couldn't mutter more than our names or where we were from in French. Eventually though, they warmed up to us and we had a great time getting to know them. We are grateful to them for taking us into their home and showing us around town.
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