France 2007 Page 1 Toulouse

France page 1 Toulouse

France page 2 Carcassonne

France page 3 Orange, Avignon

France page 4 Lyon

France page 5 Annecy

France page 6 Dijon

Video Index (click here)

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JOURNEYS BY PAUL

Page 1

Toulouse

Click on Pics to Open Galleries

Toulouse

Toulouse City Pics

(Click on pics to open galleries)

Inside the Cathedral

Art

You Supply the Caption

Toulouse Museum Art

(click on the link or pic)

Videos

** Cathedral Music Video**

(click on the link)

(and don't get vertigo!)

**Video of La Cite**

(For Video, click picture)

In the Morning

July 3, 2007 Toulouse, France

Click on the map. Toulouse is bottom center.

July 4 Well, I’m in Toulouse, France -- where they put together the Airbus airliners, and near where Toulouse-Lautrec is from. Mr. Lautrec had both legs broken in childhood which resulted in his stunted growth. He went on to have an interesting life and painting career in the Montmartre area of Paris, where some of his favorite models were the local hookers. I thought it would be easier to get to Toulouse than to Lyon but I was wrong. It was easy to get to Paris. The AA flight was only half full, and I opted for business class, and we were even a little early, but I had to wait almost 4 hours for my connection to Toulouse which wouldn’t have been so bad except for my having, at that point, gotten only about an hour of sleep in the last 21 hours. But, you know, if I wanted everything to be easy, I could have just stayed on the sofa in my living room, and watched the Travel channel. So the flight ended up being almost full, but I can’t complain because I got an aisle seat on the hour long flight to the south of France (on Air France).

Then I took a quick bus ride into town near where my hotel was but I didn’t want to walk the rest of the way so I found a taxi stand and one of the drivers drove me about ½ mile, then charged me $13 because that was the minimum. Well, live and learn. (I didn’t know how to say thief in French). Okay, so I got to the hotel at a little after 12 noon, which means I’ve now been up for about 24 hours, but it’s okay because now I can pass out in my nice room for a few hours. Wrong! The reception at the hotel closes at noon, and doesn’t reopen until 2 p.m. (Remember it’s now 12:15.) That sofa in my living room at home is starting to look better. And with that in mind I take the elevator to the different floors until I find a nice sofa in the hallway where I took off my shoes and closed my eyes until 2 p.m. Everything went well at check in. The Hotels.Com reservation went through and the room is actually pretty nice, although there’s some traffic noise on the boulevard five floors below. Welcome to Europe.

Hey, Joan Baez is Playing Here!

After my short 2 hour nap, I walked around and got a feel for the city. It has a big, French city atmosphere (350,000 people), but the people are pretty friendly. There is, however, a large population of people of the southern Mediterranean persuasion here, which to me takes a little away from the ‘total’ French atmosphere that I experienced in most of the cities I visited back in October. But, like I said, everyone is friendly, and I had dinner at one of those ‘Mediterranean’ places -- a Lebanese restaurant. So I woke up this morning bright and early at 3:30 a.m. That’s east coast time. Here, it was 9:30 a.m., and it will take me several days to adjust to the time change. I went to a local café, and had my espresso and croissant (I’ll have to detox again when I get back to the U.S.), then went to the Musee des Augustins, where I sat for almost an hour and listened to someone play a huge pipe organ in the church. There was one long piece that could have been Bach, and had amazing bass and treble, point/counterpoint, baroque melodies. I recorded one piece on the video titled Cathedral Organ Music. That one may be on You Tube. Just click it if you see it. I didn’t get to record the great Bach-like piece.

I’m playing with my new camera, an inexpensive Canon PowerShot 550. It can be a little complicated if you try playing with all the settings. (And I am.) You can adjust shutter speeds and picture lightness, and the video controls allow for several different settings depending on how much memory you want to use. The setting I used in the cathedral will be grainy because I didn’t want download time to be long for your computers. And, of course, for those who don’t want to fool with the camera settings, the camera can be set to automatic, and you don’t have to do anything but push the button. Okay, enough about the camera (and excuses). I’ve posted a bunch of pictures with very little clever text or captions because I’m tired. Perhaps I’ll add more to those later. When you click on the pictures to the left, most of the time a gallery of associated pictures will open. (I hope.)

They Really Like Me Here!

Click on the picture!

The new Die Hard movie is playing at one of the local theaters. Usually those type of movies are played in France in the original language (version original) without dubbing, but the clerk at the theater told me the new Die Hard was in French because the people here like their Bruce Willis speaking French. I don’t know if that’s just here in Toulouse or in all of France. I asked him if there were at least English subtitles. (Not really.) This city isn’t too bad but I yearn for the peacefulness of a more pastoral setting so tomorrow I’m heading out. I went to the train station today, and got a lot of information on getting to Carcassonne (a walled Medieval city) and Avignon (another walled city where a 'lavender' festival is happening all month). Also, the French holidays begin on Friday. I don’t know what to expect but I’ll find out.

If any link is not working, email me and let me know. I'm doing this kind of fast. Well, I just went down to the lobby to buy a wifi pass to get this page on the net, and they wanted 6 euros for one hour. That's 8 U.S. dollars. I know an internet cafe that charges less than 2 euros per hour so I'll drag the old laptop over there in a little while. And get this, I have a letter on my door from the management. They advise me -- "Before leaving, please clean your flat, vacuum, wash your dishes and throw your garbages away by the rubbish chute. Otherwise we will have to charge a housekeeping (50 euros)." Haha! Now that's rubbish! I should charge them for poor grammar.

July 5 I’m sitting on a train waiting to leave for Carcassonne. I should be an hour trip. You have to be careful when you look for your train. If I were to just read the electronic billboard for the trip to Carcassonne, I would be leaving about 20 minutes later than this train, and I wouldn’t get to my destination until 2 hours later. This train’s billboard sign labels it as the train to Avignon, which is it’s final destination. So with a little diligence, I compare the departure time on my ticket with the departure times on the billboards, then look at the Avignon train destinations, and find that Carcassonne is one of it’s destinations. By the way, none of my credit cards worked on the ticket machines. I had to go to the counter to buy my ticket. But they’re all very nice, and the line went fast.

They Prefer Bruce To Speak French

Speaking of lines, I went to the movies last night. No, I didn’t see Bruce Willis because I can’t speak French well enough. After some thought, I conjectured that the reason the French people want to hear Bruce Willis in French is because he usually doesn’t say much, so nothing is lost in the translation. I went to see Raison D’Etat. It‘s called The Good Shepherd in English. It’s the one with Matt Damon (who also doesn’t talk much in this movie), Angelina Jolie, William Hurt, Robert Deniro and Alec Baldwin. So I bought my ticket at about 8:10 because the schedule said the movie began at 8:20. But when I tried to enter past the lobby, the lobby personnel looked over at something, then told me I had to wait outside the ropes in the lobby area for 13 minutes. So, the 8:20 wasn’t really the start time for the movie; it was just the boarding time for the theater. There was a countdown clock that the lobby personnel would look at, and it would read off the minutes before we could be let in. Once we were in the theater, we still had to wait before the previews, etc. began. The theater was nice. There wasn’t stadium seating, but the seats were very comfortable, and the screen was large and concave. Another thing I’ve noticed in French theaters is that people don’t really consume mass quantities while they watch like they do in the U.S. Out of about 70 people in the theater, only five were eating anything. (Me being one of them.) By the way, the new Simpsons movie preview got a lot of laughs from the locals. Remember, they love Jerry Lewis. Oh yeah, when the movie was over we had to all exit out the front, and I ended up on a street with cafes and such, and I didn’t know where I was. Some of the other patrons seemed confused also. If you’re interested, the movie was good, and it was long.

Carcassonne Still July 5 The hour train ride was uneventful except for the thousands of acres of sunflower fields that covered the hills of the countryside. I never really thought about where they grew sunflowers although I’ve been a fan of the seeds since high school. The green and yellow fields were quite a sight, and I wondered if the people in the houses that skirted the crops enjoyed a changing view during the day since the sunflower turns it’s face to the sun as the day wears on. If you think that’s a weird thought, I should mention some of the things that went through my mind when I was trying to take that nap after being up for 24 hours. Most of them were just images, but the one scene that I do remember was an alteration of that movie Tom Hanks was in where he was a castaway. I don’t remember the name. Maybe it was called ‘Castaway.’ But in my dream, the main character was played by Jackie Gleason instead of Tom Hanks. Can you imagine Jackie Gleason tan and bearded on that raft yelling “Wilson, Wilson.” No? Okay forget it. Oh, I just remembered. Didn't Jackie Gleason play Tom Hanks' father in a movie?

I made a movie of some scenes of La Cite (pronounced See-tay) which is a 12^th century walled city near my hotel here in Carcassonne. I'm sure you guessed that Cite means city. I also posted pictures to the left. Hopefully, I’ll be able to upload the movie to YouTube. If not, it’ll be there soon. Carcassonne is a pretty amazing Medieval walled city. It’s the walled city to beat walled cities. It stands high on a hill, and there are the first walls surrounding the city that are about 80 feet high. Then there’s a flat area. Then there’s another wall inside that wall that surrounds the city. Then in the very center is a castle with walls surrounded by a moat. I’m going to have to research it to find out why it was so guarded. I bet even Uhtred, son of Ragnar, would have a tough time storming this place. Speaking of storming, there’s a lot of tourists here, and I was warned in my book that it can be a 'tourist hell.’ But since I expected the worst, it’s not so bad. Tomorrow, I’m heading to Avignon. Okay, that’s it for now. I’m going to try and upload this mess. (Oh yeah, I took the new pictures with more resolution.)

thanks,

Paul Ogier