Interrail - Toulouse

I arrived in Toulouse on Tuesday 4th of December to find Gabriel waiting on the platform for me. I know Gabriel (20), his two brothers Elie (17) and Ben (14) plus their parents because of my parents. My father, Martin, went to University with their father, Martyn. I hadn`t seen them since the photo below, I think I may have been 14, but since I was in France, I thought I'd pay a visit. After a few emails the details were set and here I am...

Ice cream eating competition at Dragon King, Letchworth

Today was my only full day in the area so I decided to explore Toulouse a bit more and Gabriel joined me. We started by going to the Fair Trade Market which was very small but had some very very nice hand-made items.

Fair Trade Market

We then went to the first Museum of the day: Les Abattoirs. The tourist brochure (aquired the day before) led me to believe that the Museum would be "a unique collection of over 3,500 art works enable us to explore the artistic trends from WWII until today's creation expressions." Instead it was an exhibition about 'Magic Carpets' which turned out to pretty much just be creepy and boring at the same time. (Luckily the entry was free instead of the €7 euros one usually has to pay, the secretary at the front was on his break so the security guard let us in for free)

Walking through Toulouse

After that we went to the second Museum: Galerie de Chateau d'eau. For this, the brochure got it pretty much spot on with "entirely dedicated to photographic art". Todays exhibition showed the work of Richard Park who travelled the United States every year from 2003 to 2009 taking the saying "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" as his common thread. The leaflet given to you at the entrance explains that "he chose to look at two Americas. That of the middle class living the >American Dream< and that of the >little people< living on the edge of this illusion.

Apart from say 3 photographs, I couldn't see many representations of the middle-class however the photographs made a lot more sense once you read the little diary extracts given for parts of his trip. Basically he's a casual drug user taking photographs of more messed-up and harder drug addicts than himself; with a few exceptions of course, including a trailer park with a ban on all alcohol.

A Christmas Market

After that we'd had enough of Museums so went to the Christmas Market which happened to be surrounded by the normal Wednesday Market as well so that was cool!

6 glasses for 2.

At 3pm we realised we were very hungry so went in search for a Pizza place Gabriel new, unfortunatley it was closed so we went to a pub like place across the road. The entrance smelled like urine which wasn't a great start but actually once you got in it didn't smell and the food was really nice, including home-made chips.

Having stuffed ourselves full and being tired of walking around, we decided to go to the nearby cinema. We ended up watching "Killing them sofly" as the adverts were half way through by the time we got our tickets. The movie stars Brad Pitt, is produced by him, and has a lot of blood and shooting. Apart from that, the point of the move it very minimal and could be accounted for in the last 5 minutes of the movie. Overall, "Pointless" was my review. The entire movie could have been shortened to 10 minutes and the same message would have been brought - "America is not a country, it's a business."

We got the Metro then Bus back to the Smith's house and here I am typing this. Overall a pretty unusual day! Now it's time for me to pack again -I am heading to Paris tomorrow! Actually reaaaally looking forward to this, I've never been but it's one city I've actually always wanted to go to. (I'm not a huge City Girl so this is unusual for me.)

Lots of love,

Lucy from the World
                               xxo

Look Becky, it's your cars French Twin ;)