Our first trip to France, Chapter One
It's taken me literally four working days to edit (and in some cases discard) 126 photos! And that's just the pictures! Go get a cup or glass of your favorite beverage, go potty, and settle in!
Chapter One: In which we fly the Northern Passage from Washington state to Toulouse, France, and go in search of soy milk
Jessica dropped H and I off at Seattle airport on Wednesday, May 5th. You all know what airports are like. Wait in line, look at info boards, wander around, watch people, maybe eat something marginally acceptable, go through security ...... Then you get to cram into an uncomfy seat, etc.. That took us to Calgary. We did the airport thing for a couple hours, then flew to Heathrow, London, England. We had about 6 hours to kill there. It's a wonderful airport, as these things go. Light, big, lots of good food places, stores, nice bathrooms. We tried to get some work done, but were out of sorts, and out of wifi range for H's laptop, even in the Starbuck's seating area we staked out. I spent a lot of time walking around, trying to get my feet unswollen, and my innards in order. Finally, we boarded for Toulouse. Suddenly, everyone around us was speaking French. Oh boy. This is for real!
We got into Toulouse around 11 pm or so. We wandered around the nearly deserted airport looking for a working ATM for H to get some Euros for the shuttle. Finally found one on another floor, and made it to the bus stop just in time to board a bus! H had researched all this, and between the language skills of the three of us (the driver and us), we managed to get off at the right stop, only almost head off in the wrong direction, find a bus kiosk map, straighten out, and drag ourselves and our luggage a block and a half to our hotel. H got us checked in no problems, so we took our big brass key fob, squeeked into the tiny elevator with our luggage, and up to our room. The light was off in the hall, but our door was *rrriiiight* by the elevator. No energy to explore much. We splashed then crashed.
H tells me there was a lot of yelling in the street, but I slept through it. We were to learn that that was a quiet night! We got up around 8:30, which is pretty good, don't you think?
We spent the morning walking all over Toulouse looking for "soy milk". I really enjoyed Toulouse. Very walkable, very interesting, old and new, upscale and run-down, all literally sharing walls along the mostly narrow streets.
It was hard to concentrate on all the newness without my cafe avec la lait de soja (as I thought it might be called), however. Everyone wanted to help. The waiter at a cafe had NO idea what I was saying, and called over a young couple nearby, who came over to try to work it out. The young woman puzzled and puzzled. Finally she says to me, "Milk ... is from cow. Mooo. Mooooo?" Ah well. The search continued.
We finally ran across the marche´ (market) that runs every day in Toulouse. There's a big building that has meat, fish, cheese, bread, and some prepared foods vendors inside, produce outside, and restaurants upstairs in one long arcade (which we didn't discover 'til we came back a week later). We toured around and around, me wrinkling my nose at the dead or sour animal smells, then spreading my nostrils wide around the boulangeries! This is what I wrote in our trip journal:
The scaley black globes I think are some form of beet. I wonder what one does with them??
Oddly, I took no pictures. Must have been overwhelmed!
We collected at least one picnique's worth of food (curried lentils from an Indian vendor, a seedy baguette, prunes, spanish almonds, banana chips, and a small chevre and salmon quiche for H), H got us a couple bottled waters somewhere. Still no soy milk! We sat to eat in a square with a fountain surrounding a sculpture of some guy, and a merry go round sitting quietly to the side, trees, grass, flower beds, and homeless people with their dogs.
We were also on the look-out for a place to change our money. Banks couldn't, and no help finding another option.
You must imagine this all occurring in a sort of automatonic haze of jet-lag and culture shock, wonder and fatigue.
H in yet another plaza, with some art and an old lady with a turquoise ducky bag.
See?
We decided to take a break back at the hotel. We got a time card for internet time, checked in with Jess, H worked some, and we just relaxed a little. Our room had a tiny balcony,
sort of a shelf with a wall, overlooking the narrow street and the roofs and courtyards across. There was a bolster pillow under the bottom sheet of the bed (how civilized!) A little bathroom, with a tiny bath with only half a glass door, and a toilet that had a flush and a stop-flushing toggle button. (Some interpretation of the "number one" or "number two" flush was pretty common outside the States.)
At about 2, we had to go get the rental car. That was an adventure! We walked the several blocks across the canal to the train station where the rental office was. Even negotiating, we still had to pay a huge extra insurance fee that just about doubled what H had understood the rental to cost for 8 days! But that's just money. :P We still had to get the car back to the hotel and into the tiny below-grade parking area. H navigated the narrow, confusing streets admirably. The driveway was blocked by the metal doors operated from inside, as we found out.
After playing a sort of tag with the woman at the front desk, I pushed the button myself to let him in, and we carefully guided him down the corkscrew driveway into a miniature parking spot between scraped and chunked out concrete walls. We were happy to leave the car there, and get back to walking!
This is a stitched-together photo from Google street-view that shows our hotel, and the parking entrance (the red metal doors) just beyond the hotel door.
Yes. That small. Notice the size of the street compared to the guy walking under the yellow awning. Barely one car wide, and that a small car! You can see some red chairs on the sidewalk ahead of the walking guy. That's the noisy nightclub. (H says it's actually one on our side of the street.)
We had yet to find a place to change our money, and it was getting late on Friday. We were on a mission. We'd been directed to a bank, but it had a sign saying no exchange on the door. We kept on. We found another bank. They have these security doors on the banks where you have to buzz for access to a sort of airlock, then be buzzed into the bank proper. The young man in this bank took our little city map, and marked where he said was an exchange place. Off we went. We found the place, same kind of security doors, TINY little closet of a space, got our money changed, and out in minutes! Right across the street was a little grocery store no bigger than PJ's bathroom. Wouldn't you know it, there they had boxes of "boisson de soja": soy DRINK. Okay, fine; "drink" not "milk"! Suddenly, the sun came out for me! It's the little things, y'know? Too warm for cafe´, but we bought it anyway, and went on with our walk.
We walked all the way to the river, with it's several bridges, and along the high wall above the water.
That's the Pont Neuf bridge behind me there.
Below, there's a green with a walking path alongside at water level. I wonder if it was ever a tow path?
We were starting to wear down a bit, so we wandered back along a less commercial route. We ran across a little art gallery showing two artists' drawings, very contemporary, angry-young-artist type drawings with lots of sexual content. We were ignored as we wandered around looking at the drawings, some of which were done right on the brick walls.
On our way back, right around the corner from our hotel, we found another small grocery we hadn't noticed before (must have been closed and dark - lunchtime?) They also had boxes of soy drink, so we bought another, some juice, and went back to the hotel.
After vegging blearily for a bit, we decided we should find dinner, then call it a day. I had looked up veggie restaurants before we left, but forgot to bring the list with me, so had to do that again. One was right around the block from us. Sadly, that one was no more, so on to the second choice a few blocks away. Early Friday evening: everyone is starting to hit the streets. Dressed mostly in stylish black, young couples, packs of college-age kids, families, and older folks are all out. The sidewalks are a maze of cafe´ tables and menus on stands or sandwich boards. We find the place we're looking for, read the menu as best we can, and decide it will probably do. We sit on the sidewalk at a tiny round table, and are served promptly: a small carafe of red wine, a soup plate of green beans in a savory-creamy green sauce made from courgettes (zukes), with three rectangles of soft tofu arranged in rays, and punctuated by four halved cherry tomatoes. H got skewers with salmon, chicken and something on a bed of green salad, with a pile of green beans and two small pita sandwiches with gouda and prosciutto (he thinks). A basket of whole wheat bread, a wine bottle with water, the water glasses, assorted other doo dads ... our tiny table was lost! The meal was quite nice (especially considering I'm not fond of green beans!), the waiter was adorable, the passing scene was fun to watch: We were in France, enjoying our first restaurant dinner, at a sidewalk cafe´, as the mild evening air cooled towards the dark. Aaaaah!
Another google picture
We decided to walk around a bit after we ate, and finally got back "home" around 8:30 or so
The nightclub across the street was barely awake. We read a bit, gave up, and went to sleep. For awhile.
H woke up rehearsing getting the car in and out of the parking garage. I woke up obsessively going over my minimal French and the phrases I'd heard during the day. The nightclub was heating up. Major par-TAY! After an hour or two, we managed to get back to some kind of sleep, thank goodness!
~~ End of Chapter One.
--
"I shall pass through this world but once. Any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any [fellow creature], let me do it now." ~Etienne de Grellet [and me]
Chapter One: In which we fly the Northern Passage from Washington state to Toulouse, France, and go in search of soy milk
Jessica dropped H and I off at Seattle airport on Wednesday, May 5th. You all know what airports are like. Wait in line, look at info boards, wander around, watch people, maybe eat something marginally acceptable, go through security ...... Then you get to cram into an uncomfy seat, etc.. That took us to Calgary. We did the airport thing for a couple hours, then flew to Heathrow, London, England. We had about 6 hours to kill there. It's a wonderful airport, as these things go. Light, big, lots of good food places, stores, nice bathrooms. We tried to get some work done, but were out of sorts, and out of wifi range for H's laptop, even in the Starbuck's seating area we staked out. I spent a lot of time walking around, trying to get my feet unswollen, and my innards in order. Finally, we boarded for Toulouse. Suddenly, everyone around us was speaking French. Oh boy. This is for real!
We got into Toulouse around 11 pm or so. We wandered around the nearly deserted airport looking for a working ATM for H to get some Euros for the shuttle. Finally found one on another floor, and made it to the bus stop just in time to board a bus! H had researched all this, and between the language skills of the three of us (the driver and us), we managed to get off at the right stop, only almost head off in the wrong direction, find a bus kiosk map, straighten out, and drag ourselves and our luggage a block and a half to our hotel. H got us checked in no problems, so we took our big brass key fob, squeeked into the tiny elevator with our luggage, and up to our room. The light was off in the hall, but our door was *rrriiiight* by the elevator. No energy to explore much. We splashed then crashed.
H tells me there was a lot of yelling in the street, but I slept through it. We were to learn that that was a quiet night! We got up around 8:30, which is pretty good, don't you think?
We spent the morning walking all over Toulouse looking for "soy milk". I really enjoyed Toulouse. Very walkable, very interesting, old and new, upscale and run-down, all literally sharing walls along the mostly narrow streets.
It was hard to concentrate on all the newness without my cafe avec la lait de soja (as I thought it might be called), however. Everyone wanted to help. The waiter at a cafe had NO idea what I was saying, and called over a young couple nearby, who came over to try to work it out. The young woman puzzled and puzzled. Finally she says to me, "Milk ... is from cow. Mooo. Mooooo?" Ah well. The search continued.
We finally ran across the marche´ (market) that runs every day in Toulouse. There's a big building that has meat, fish, cheese, bread, and some prepared foods vendors inside, produce outside, and restaurants upstairs in one long arcade (which we didn't discover 'til we came back a week later). We toured around and around, me wrinkling my nose at the dead or sour animal smells, then spreading my nostrils wide around the boulangeries! This is what I wrote in our trip journal:
"... a fandango of smells and mysterious our unashamedly obvious foodstuff. Whole fish with glazed eyes, tongues as big as my calf draped on ice, cheeses melting on trays, squid and octopus in puddles or tight curls, sausages coiled or draped, pastries in golden profusion, salads and pate's, suckling pigs hanging by their trotterless ankles, trotters in pale piles, ducks naked except for their blind feathered heads, chicken and pigeon, slabs, heaps and bowls full of animal chunks. Outside the building were the produce vendors, with tables full of strawberries, tomatoes of different sizes and colors, eggplants, zucchini, onions green, red, purple, long and round, garlic, dried fruit, olives nuts, hot pink radishes, frothing lettuces, and unidentifiable scaley black globes."
The scaley black globes I think are some form of beet. I wonder what one does with them??
Oddly, I took no pictures. Must have been overwhelmed!
We collected at least one picnique's worth of food (curried lentils from an Indian vendor, a seedy baguette, prunes, spanish almonds, banana chips, and a small chevre and salmon quiche for H), H got us a couple bottled waters somewhere. Still no soy milk! We sat to eat in a square with a fountain surrounding a sculpture of some guy, and a merry go round sitting quietly to the side, trees, grass, flower beds, and homeless people with their dogs.
We were also on the look-out for a place to change our money. Banks couldn't, and no help finding another option.
H in the courtyard of ... um ... and old building now used as
some kind of school/civic function place
You must imagine this all occurring in a sort of automatonic haze of jet-lag and culture shock, wonder and fatigue.
H in yet another plaza, with some art and an old lady with a turquoise ducky bag.
HWe decided to take a break back at the hotel. We got a time card for internet time, checked in with Jess, H worked some, and we just relaxed a little. Our room had a tiny balcony,
At about 2, we had to go get the rental car. That was an adventure! We walked the several blocks across the canal to the train station where the rental office was. Even negotiating, we still had to pay a huge extra insurance fee that just about doubled what H had understood the rental to cost for 8 days! But that's just money. :P We still had to get the car back to the hotel and into the tiny below-grade parking area. H navigated the narrow, confusing streets admirably. The driveway was blocked by the metal doors operated from inside, as we found out.
After playing a sort of tag with the woman at the front desk, I pushed the button myself to let him in, and we carefully guided him down the corkscrew driveway into a miniature parking spot between scraped and chunked out concrete walls. We were happy to leave the car there, and get back to walking!
This is a stitched-together photo from Google street-view that shows our hotel, and the parking entrance (the red metal doors) just beyond the hotel door.
Yes. That small. Notice the size of the street compared to the guy walking under the yellow awning. Barely one car wide, and that a small car! You can see some red chairs on the sidewalk ahead of the walking guy. That's the noisy nightclub. (H says it's actually one on our side of the street.)
We had yet to find a place to change our money, and it was getting late on Friday. We were on a mission. We'd been directed to a bank, but it had a sign saying no exchange on the door. We kept on. We found another bank. They have these security doors on the banks where you have to buzz for access to a sort of airlock, then be buzzed into the bank proper. The young man in this bank took our little city map, and marked where he said was an exchange place. Off we went. We found the place, same kind of security doors, TINY little closet of a space, got our money changed, and out in minutes! Right across the street was a little grocery store no bigger than PJ's bathroom. Wouldn't you know it, there they had boxes of "boisson de soja": soy DRINK. Okay, fine; "drink" not "milk"! Suddenly, the sun came out for me! It's the little things, y'know? Too warm for cafe´, but we bought it anyway, and went on with our walk.
We walked all the way to the river, with it's several bridges, and along the high wall above the water.
Below, there's a green with a walking path alongside at water level. I wonder if it was ever a tow path?
We were starting to wear down a bit, so we wandered back along a less commercial route. We ran across a little art gallery showing two artists' drawings, very contemporary, angry-young-artist type drawings with lots of sexual content. We were ignored as we wandered around looking at the drawings, some of which were done right on the brick walls.
On our way back, right around the corner from our hotel, we found another small grocery we hadn't noticed before (must have been closed and dark - lunchtime?) They also had boxes of soy drink, so we bought another, some juice, and went back to the hotel.
After vegging blearily for a bit, we decided we should find dinner, then call it a day. I had looked up veggie restaurants before we left, but forgot to bring the list with me, so had to do that again. One was right around the block from us. Sadly, that one was no more, so on to the second choice a few blocks away. Early Friday evening: everyone is starting to hit the streets. Dressed mostly in stylish black, young couples, packs of college-age kids, families, and older folks are all out. The sidewalks are a maze of cafe´ tables and menus on stands or sandwich boards. We find the place we're looking for, read the menu as best we can, and decide it will probably do. We sit on the sidewalk at a tiny round table, and are served promptly: a small carafe of red wine, a soup plate of green beans in a savory-creamy green sauce made from courgettes (zukes), with three rectangles of soft tofu arranged in rays, and punctuated by four halved cherry tomatoes. H got skewers with salmon, chicken and something on a bed of green salad, with a pile of green beans and two small pita sandwiches with gouda and prosciutto (he thinks). A basket of whole wheat bread, a wine bottle with water, the water glasses, assorted other doo dads ... our tiny table was lost! The meal was quite nice (especially considering I'm not fond of green beans!), the waiter was adorable, the passing scene was fun to watch: We were in France, enjoying our first restaurant dinner, at a sidewalk cafe´, as the mild evening air cooled towards the dark. Aaaaah!
Another google picture
We decided to walk around a bit after we ate, and finally got back "home" around 8:30 or so
The nightclub across the street was barely awake. We read a bit, gave up, and went to sleep. For awhile.
H woke up rehearsing getting the car in and out of the parking garage. I woke up obsessively going over my minimal French and the phrases I'd heard during the day. The nightclub was heating up. Major par-TAY! After an hour or two, we managed to get back to some kind of sleep, thank goodness!
~~ End of Chapter One.
--
"I shall pass through this world but once. Any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any [fellow creature], let me do it now." ~Etienne de Grellet [and me]
Comments
Post a Comment