Are we in France yet? Yep! One week in Toulouse
After a very long line for immigration and having to navigate the inscrutable Orly airport, we had a quick flight to Toulouse. FYI, Orly and CDG are both a hot mess, so there’s no winning if you have a connecting flight going through Paris.
The river Garonne runs through the heart of the city.
From past experience, I know that it takes us about a week to recover from jet lag and the general hassle of international flight, so we booked an apartment in the center of Toulouse.
We stayed in the Carmes district, which is easy walking distance from the Garonne river and just about everything else in Toulouse, including restaurants, parks and a lot of shopping.
Right along the river, I found a great donut shop. Perfect jet lag recovery food! Le donut is very popular in France right now. In fact, we saw a lot of American food trends all over France… poke bowls, tacos, cookies and loaded burgers. Maybe I’ll open a fudge shoppee.
Actually, fresh air and light exercise is the recommended cure for jet lag. We walked to the Jardin des Plantes on our second day in the city. It felt great to be in the Southwest of France with its warm, dry air. It reminded me of October in California.
In the park, there’s a lovely statue of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who flew the Toulouse-Dakar route for Aéropostale in the the 1920’s before instrument guided aviation. He’s holding a book upon which stands le petit prince, his most famous literary creation. Mark thought it was a statue of St. Francis of Assisi holding a laptop. Seriously.
In another part of the park, we found an installation of cartoon panels talking about modern media. Translation: Trump, the pope of fake news. “Nobody respects women more than me. Nobody.” I thought we were supposed to be communing with nature, not stressing out about politics!
Fortunately for Mark, CBD products are now legal and widely available in France. Strangely, the last line on the label says “Do not eat - Do not smoke”. I’m not sure the French know how cannabis is supposed to work. Just kidding. They actually have the highest user rate of any EU country despite the fact that cannabis with THC is still completely illegal.
My drug of choice… the chocolatine (aka the pain au chocolat in the rest of France)!
…and shopping! Toulouse is full of cute independent shops. I was drawn into this “papeterie” and wanted to buy everything!
Mark and I both love antique shops, so we trekked to this one across town. It’s tucked in a vast warehouse down a little alley in a residential street and we almost missed it! The owner had a giant teddy bear that was once used in a display at a Jean-Paul Gauthier boutique. I asked him it the bear had a name and he said “It’s like with chickens. If you give them a name, you’re sad to see them go.” True enough.
We were also lucky to catch this monthly antiques fair along one of the main boulevards. I wanted to buy a rusty old tabletop baguette guillotine chopper (like they used to have in bistros for cutting hunks of baguette), but Mark wouldn’t let me. I’m not sure how I was going to lug it around France and the UK for 6 months, but I was willing to try.
Maybe I could get one of these gorgeous old clocks in my suitcase? Maybe not. I just had a new battery put in my watch instead.
After the antiques fair, we decided to stick to sight seeing. It’s free and you don’t have to ship anything home. Toulouse is known as La Ville Rose or the pink city because of it’s distinctive red or pink bricks.
This basilica is a fine example of this regional building style. The romans started the tradition in the region because stone was rare and they found huge deposits of iron rich clay near the area’s wide rivers.
Toulouse is a lovely city, maybe a tad rough around the edges as are most larger cities in the south of France. It doesn’t boast the best museums or grand architecture, but it’s also not overrun with tourists, which is rare in France these days. Thank you, Toulouse, for helping us get over our jet lag. Next stop: La Dordogne!
