Toulouse

I'm going to let David tell you about Toulouse since frankly there's not much to tell so two posts would be redundant. He'll append his section to this post once he writes it.

Edit from Derek: I don't feel like prodding David to do blog posts so I'm just going to write this one before it's too late. :P

We crossed into France by way of a bus from Barcelona. The first thing I noticed was the crisp, clean mountain air. Toulouse isn't in the middle of the Pyrenees but we did have to cross some fairly rural territory to get there. I also noticed that I couldn't communicate with anyone (since I only speak Spanish and English) and that the price of water had gone up. Oh well.

Toulouse was fairly easy to navigate - although it's not that large, it has a helpful metro system. After attempting to find an open hostel, we eventually decided to save some money and set up our tent at a local campsite. We got real French baguettes and settled down for a cheap night of sleeping on the ground.

The first order of business in the morning was to find a hostel for the next night. This objective was quickly superceded when we passed a nearby bakery and decided it was mandatory to purchase a croissant and a pain du chocolat. Mmm!

After the bakery, we used Skype in a cybercafe to book a night at a cheap nearby hotel we had found in David's travel book. When we arrived at said hotel, they didn't have our reservation. In fact, they said the number we had called wasn't theirs! Turns out his book switched around the names and numbers of a few hotels, so we walked back across town to the hotel we had actually booked at.

We dropped our bags at the hostel we found and set out to explore the city. As it turned out, Toulouse was more of an introduction to France than an actual attraction in and of itself. We walked around for a while and admired some of the architecture, then headed to a shop and got baguette-sandwiches. (By the way, the food in France is awesome!)

The next morning, we hopped on a train to Lourdes, where we would start our trip into the Pyrenees. Ok, so Toulouse wasn't all that interesting, but it was a great jumping-off point for the rest of France.

Au revoir!

< Derek >