Bonne Continuation

So voilà, here is my last blog post in la belle France, provided I finish before I have to board the aeroplane. I'm currently sitting in Toulouse-Blagnac airport waiting for my flight to Manchester to take me home for a few days. But let's discuss the past week or so first? Okay :)

So when my parents went home it was back to work as usual on the bar for a week. Work was fine but really really struggled with the weather these past two weeks, normal,y it gets hot and then cools for a few days and then builds up again, but the last two weeks it's just been mental hot 24/7. One of the things I'm looking forward to most about the UK is being able to sleep! Even the locals were struggling; Anne-Marie refused to give me la bise because, her words not mine, her face was soaking with sweat. Noice. Was a nice week because all of the staff were back of their holidays by then, so it was nice to have new-ish people to talk to and discuss different parts of France, some of which I'd been to.

The Friday after my parents came some random lad/ one of my best mates called Jim Hall turned up in France and stayed with me for a week. I think he liked Toulouse, although he said there's not a million things to do there. I think he struggled with the heat a bit but it's alright for some because he had a cheeky swimming pool he could cool down in. One thing he did comment on was the café culture, and how that carries on at night time, about being served rather than asking for a drunk at the bar. It's true and it was my new favourite word to complain in French 'chiant' that we had to wait a good 15 minutes for our drinks when it was busy. That's worse than Cuth's bar waiting time! But on the other hand if you're out to have a relaxing drink with your friends why do you need to push and shove and get sweaty and wind yourself up forcing yourself to the front of the queue? Not really relaxing if you ask me.

I will admit that when Jacques Vestibule was here we went to the cinema and watched a film in VOST (version originale sous-titrée) i.e. in English. We watched Total Recall. I've never seen the original but I know that the remake has some bad reviews but I thought it was really good. One thing though? What's with these remakes at the moment, Spiderman is also one...can people not make new stories and stop trying to improve things that don't necessarily need improving? Chiant! Anyway retournons à nos moutons, we had a good night watching that. The other day I watched Associés Contre Le Crime, which is a dramatisation of one of Agatha Christie's novels. After doing some research it's the third in a trilogy but I thought it didn't matter because I understood the plot and stuff anyway...at least I thought I did?

At the hostel this week I met a really nice man called Moises, who is from Santiago de Compostela in Spain, very very close to Vigo where I'm off next. He gave me loads of practical information about Vigo and finding accommodation and stuff. Really nice man, however, like most Spanish people I've met her talks. Non-stop. I feel kinda sorry for him to be honest because he came to Toulouse looking for work because the situation in a Spain is so bad at the moment, so his plan was to improve his French and then move to England to his girlfriend and teach French and Spanish here. But then his computer got stolen by whoever was sharing a room with him and various things have happened/been said during talks with the police that he has been totally put off France as a country and never wants to live here ever. It's an awful shame that someone could be put off an entire country because of one or two things. I don't know what went on at the police but France is generally a nice, welcoming country - at least that's what I found - so it's a massive shame that he will always carry this view of France now. So he's going back to Spain for a while before going to England and hopefully we can meet when I'm there as we're not far away at all.
On Sunday one of my Durhamite friends, Henrietta, was in Toulouse. She's working in Bordeaux over summer and her and a friend made a day trip out to Toulouse and I spent the afternoon with them. I found out something quite interesting, apparently there is a massive rivalry between Bordeaux and Toulouse, as the fourth city of France. I've only been told that Toulouse is the fourth city but Henrietta said that Bordeaux is. Apparently all of her friends asked why she was going to Toulouse because it's a disgusting city with nothing to do. I agree with the latter but it's certainly not disgusting. Jealousy because Toulouse is so pink and Bordeaux is architecturally similar to most French cities I reckon. Anyway, was great to catch up a little. When they went to go home to station was all cordoned off, with police, firefighters and the army all around it! Bomb alert apparently, the arrivals hall was still open though, which I thought was a little weird. It just reminded me that Toulouse is not the safest place to live in, however safe you feel. With bomb alerts, random shootings and bank hostages, it's not immune to crime even if you generally feel safe walking around...most of it.

So today has been full of goodbyes. Last night there was a little soirée to say goodbye, nothing too crazy, Solenn made a pot of tea for everyone because I like tea and it'll remind them of me whenever they drink it, which was nice. But none of them had milk in it so it was only a half-hearted attempt ;). I had a little meeting with my boss in which I told him what I thought of the placement. I learnt a new phrase, which sums up what people mean when they say goodbye, it's bonne continuation, good luck for the future. Also, I've been given a little cadeau which I'm not allowed to open until I'm on the plane, which will be very soon. So I'm going to go now, see you very soon England!

Oh by the way, in the airport there was this old woman who works there who was on fold-away scooter thing like we used to have when we were kids! Made me laugh so thought I'd share it.

Eh bien...au revoir la France et à la prochaine!

Tomber Dans les Pommes

It's been sooo long since I've updated this but I've been rushed off my feet the past two weeks so sorry for what is bound to be a long post!

One of the things I've been up to is making a full English breakfast for people one morning. As I said in my last blog post I've only ever cooked for two before so the pressure was on to cater for 20. But we got there alright. It included sausage, bacon, beans (courtesy of the English section of Auchan, which also sells cheesecake mixture, scone mixture, golden syrup and jars of curry, all for ridiculous prices!) hash browns and tomatoes. I think that is was great success, because there were lots of empty plates but the French keep saying that "on mange mal là-bas" (the English eat badly) so I just have to remind them that they gobbled it all up so it can't be that bad!

Another evening the Residence did a Dino Apératoire, which is just like little bits of food to eat. I made little portions of fish and chips (fish pre-made) which everyone liked as well! Never actually made my own chips before, only seen it done, so I was a bit worried about causing a chip-pan fire or something but we got there safe and sound. I also decided to make crisps out of the skins, which didn't go down as well, but l'économie protège du besoin - waste not,want not. It did get a bit confusing though because they kept calling fish and chips les fish and chips and then crisps are chips in French too, so I had no idea if they meant are the chips ready or are the crisps ready. 

Dino Apératoire

So I've shown the French a little bit of our cuisine and it seemed to go down well, especially among a group that we have in at the moment. It's a group called the League de l'Enseignement which, for this group anyway, provides holidays for mentally disabled people. They spend a lot of time in the bar area, watching the telly and playing pétanque. So I've been taught how to play pétanque by them, which makes me feel a little bit more French. We had a game of residents vs the group, and I'm not sure who won because I still don't understand how the points system works. The one thing is that they don't understand that as an English person I don't always understand what they say, especially when they start speaking really quickly or they give numbers for where they're from. France is split in to departments which are numbered, so when I ask them where they're from and they say 25 and I say I have no idea where 25 is, they just keep telling me it's the 25 and don't give a place name. I only know that one of the group, Marcel, is from Nimes, but the others are from 25, 31, 82 and 16. You know as much as I do. 

We've started playing football on a Thursday evening now, which is great because it means I don't have to work because I go there as one of the "animateurs." Really enjoying it, we bumped in to a team which was training and they offered us a match so we played. I took up my old Tean Rangers position of left back, although I played a bit yesterday on right back and think I was better there, even though I'm left footed. I was shocked how much energy it took out of me though; I've started up running for about the past year but it's so much harder to play in a match than run constantly for an hour. I think I might change my exercise routine to incorporate stopping and sprinting to make me more used to it. I kept being called "anglais" on the pitch, which annoyed me a bit at first; I was like I do have a name, but nicknames stick I suppose.

Film-wise I've watched the new Batman film, in French, which I really liked even though it lasted so long. I've also seen a film called Bowling which is set in Brittany, more precisely in a town near to Brest, which is where my friend Vern is doing an ERASMUS exchange in September. It looks a really nice, rural part of France; sure he will be very happy there. Heat-wise I'm still not coping at night at all, it's just too hot and I need a duvet or blanket over me to be able to sleep, so I spend most of the night awake uncomfortable, which would explain my new-found coffee addiction (when in Rome). Someone suggested buying a fan, which is a very good idea but I think it's a bit silly when I'm going home in just over a week, but it's top of the list of things to buy when I'm in Spain. But hopefully by the sea and in the north of Spain it'll be a bit cooler at night time.

Pique-nique

Cordes-sur-Ciel

One day Fabien, who works at the Residence took some of us on a day trip. He's from Brittany so he wanted to explore the region a little bit too. We went to three places, the first of which was called Gaillac, which is where a famous wine comes from. It was a nice little village with not a lot there, but we had a picnic in the square and then a coffee after a walk around. Apparently it's weird to eat quiche that isn't hot, according to everyone else that was there, but I don't think I've ever eaten it hot. Fabien just shook his head and said "vous anglais," "you English" so sorry if I'm just the weird one who eats it cold because now he and the others think it's an English thing and we're weird. Then we went to a small town called Cordes-sur-Ciel, which is built on a hill, and you have to walk all the way up the hill to get there. The weather was lovely and at the top you could see miles and miles (or should I say kilometres and kilometres) of unspoiled countryside.  The town itself reminded me a little bit of an island in Brittany/Normandy which is just one town, called Mont St Michel. After a nice walked around Cordes we drove to a town called Albi, which from one view reminded me so much of Durham. See for yourselves at the end of this post! It's a nice little town, has a really impressive cathedral (no castle though!) where there was an organ concert going on, which was actually pretty good but we went after a few tunes because Anthony decided it was too scary! Haha! We managed to come home just before a huge storm arrived and we all slept in the car on the way back so we weren’t that tired when we got back, so we stayed up talking about the differences between people, mainly the opposite sexes, with Anthony (French), Brenda (Togolese) and Evelina (Romanian), which was quite interesting if not massively stereotyped.

My parents came out to Toulouse last weekend, which was really nice. They both said they really enjoyed it, because we don’t normally go into the cities when we’ve gone on holiday to France before. I hadn’t realised quite how big Toulouse is but we were all so knackered after walking around all day that we had a cheeky takeaway pizza one night because we were too tired to go in to town. One evening we went to an Indian restaurant – my first Indian in seven weeks!! – which I thought was really nice…but Mum got a bit ill afterwards, so not so sure. We had wanted to go to Carcassonne on my Monday afterwards but didn’t want to go without her, so we got a 90% refund on our tickets, 10 minutes before the train was supposed to leave! Which is great, I don’t know but I don’t think you’d get anything like that in the UK, apparently in France you get 50% back even if you didn’t catch the train, which I’m sure doesn’t happen in the UK.

Tuesday night I was really poorly too, which makes me think it was actually a bug, and Anthony had exactly the same problems on Thursday night, so I think something’s just going around, but yeah, spent Tuesday night awake doing poorly person things, which really annoyed me because Wednesday was a bank holiday and we were supposed to go canoeing. But I woke up after a few hours sleep feeling alright-ish so still went. J

St Antonin Noble Val

So France is legally a secular country, a country without a religion. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t have a day off work to celebrate the assumption of the Blessed Virgin in to heaven, especially as it means a day off work. What I found really weird was that it was on a Wednesday, on the actual day of the Assumption whereas in the UK we nearly always have bank holidays on a Monday near to something. But it was quite good to break up the week, especially as I needed a day of recovery. So I decided to go to canoeing because I probably wouldn’t get the chance to go with the same people again. One of the residents, Nina, gave me some disgusting medicine to block me up a bit and I felt better after sleeping for a while. We went to a little town about 1 ½ from Toulouse, called St Antonin Noble Val, and did a 10km canoeing course along the Aveyron river. It proper felt like being in the middle of nowhere and gave some amazing views. Me and Anthony shared a canoe, but were a bit lazy as we were both knackered and just found the current instead of rowing for most of it. We stopped by some rocks for a swim at one point and you proper felt like you’re in the middle of nowhere, really liked it. I love getting out of cities and back into the countryside, as I’ve mentioned before. By the end of the day I was so tired from the illness, barely eating and all the rowing that I don’t think we made it out of St Antonin before I fell asleep all the way back to Toulouse and then pretty much the second I got home. But, apart from a fair bit of shoulder pain and a massive bruise on my back from the canoe smacking my back, I felt a lot better the next day.

Albi or Durham?

Abli or Durham?

So there’s a whistle stop tour of the past two weeks for you all. I have about 10 days left, and will update before I leave. It’s so weird to think that the “year” abroad that everyone has talked about since the end of GCSE’s is now the 10 months 10 days abroad! 

L'habit ne fait pas le moine

Coucou! Hello! I know I only posted the other day but thought I'd post about my weekend before I forget the majority of it and end up ranting about things instead. But first I wanted to mention that one of my colleagues booked me and the other stagiare on a guided tour of Toulouse on day, which meant no work and that we got to learn loads of things about the town that we wouldn't have known otherwise. So that was nice and thought it deserved a mention. Also there’s a new chef at work and he’s giving smaller portions so I’m not feeling quite so bloated anymore, although it could just be that I’m getting used to it and not noticing that mountains of food we’re confronted with.

So I decided I wanted to get out of Toulouse for a little while, and as I have every other Monday off I decided to go for a long weekend in the Pyrenees, which aren't too far from Tolosa. My boss had recommended I do something called covoiturage, which is pretty big in France apparently. It's basically car sharing and it's a LOT cheaper than the SNCF trains. It's also really good for your French because you're cooped up with a random French person for a few hours. I would really recommend it to anyone going to France on their YA; the website is covoiturage.fr. And I know I said that the French are a bit chicken oriental on the roads but it seems that their motorway driving is a bit more civilised. So no worries!

The woman who took me to Lourdes was called Julie and she lived somewhere in the mountains. She was quite talkative and told me exactly how to get to the moutains from Lourdes and even dropped me off at my hotel, which was nice. Still a bit taken a back by all this "bise", French way of greeting business. It just seems really strange to kiss someone you don't know and have literally just met and I wonder if I come over a bit stand-offish sometimes when I'm caught off guard and don't expect it. Also what way are you supposed to go? Me and Julie had a bit of awkward moment when we chose different ways to go and nearly met in the middle. Bonjour random person I've just met! It's a lot easier to just say hello and that be enough. 

So I got to Lourdes and was dropped off at my hotel. It cost 25EUR a night and was actually quite nice for that price. It's owned by a family who lives in the hotel too and they were very friendly, even when I forgot the code to the door and had to ring the doorbell and be met by the owner in his dressing gown! I read somewhere that only Paris has more hotels than Lourdes in France, which gives you an idea that it is packed full of people. Catholics believe that Mary appeared to a girl called Bernadette there and told her to dig in the grotto and the water from where she dug has cured people. Apparently. So Lourdes has become a place of pilgrimage, which would be really nice, like it's all in the mountains and stuff I imagine it'd be quite peaceful, if it weren't absolutely rammed with shops selling all sorts of religious nonsense. Glow in the dark statues, singing replicas of the grotto, I love Mary wristbands, mints with Bernadette's face on it... for people who have such nicely decorated Churches it'd appear that most Catholics have no taste. But it's not what's sold in Lourdes that ruins it, it's simply the fact that it's so commercialised. Like people go there, many with a genuine belief that they're gonna be cured and then people are cashing in on what other people believe in. Whether it's true or not isn't important, it just feels a bit like exploitation of people's faith. But down by the grotto, which is out of town a bit it's quite cool. There's nothing else around, just the grotto and the church that Mary asked to be built. And the spring in the grotto is closed off now but it's pumped to some taps a bit further down, so after googling if it were drinkable I filled up a bottle, mainly because it was free to be honest and just to say I've drank Lourdes water. But I don't understand it at all, because Bernadette herself even said that it's not the water that cures it’s faith and prayers but whatever. One thing that was quite cool was the hill next to the basilica, where there are huge Stations of the Cross in life-size statues.

On Saturday evening I went to watch the candlelight procession around the basilica, which was cool because the only light was from the candles. There was a service going on at the same time and it was going on in French, English, Spanish, German, Italian and Dutch, I think. Linguist’s paradise! Was just standing there listening to all my languages, was surprised how much Italian I understood from not speaking it at all; I think that’ll be my next language to learn! Although the Italian people really annoyed me when I was in Lourdes, because they wouldn’t move out of the way. Ever. Like I know I said in my other blog that the French don’t move when I’m running but at least in a shop if you ask them to move they do, whereas in Lourdes it seemed that whenever there were Italians blocking  shop doorways they wouldn’t move, even when I asked. So then you have to barge them out the way and it looks like you’re the rude one, when you’re not. Probably a generalisation but it’s how they came across in Lourdes.

So after the procession I had a cheeky kebab and watched some of the Olympics. I saw parts of the opening ceremony and thought it looked really good. I watched French women’s handball and basketball, both of which France were winning in. The French are loving that they’re third (at the time of writing/last time I checked) and we’re nowhere near that. So taking the banter and waiting patiently for Team GB to start winning more.

Sunday I took a bus to a little town in the Pyrenees called Cauterets, which is a ski resort in the winter. I walked up and down a mountain next to the village, a height of 1330 meters (4363 feet) which is a little bit less than Ben Nevis and is higher than England’s highest mountain, Scaffel Pike, but I did start so much higher up too. I then took a bus to the Pont d’Espagne, which is a bridge in the middle of the mountains. There’s also a like a bit higher up, but I didn’t have the time to walk as far as that, and I don’t think I would have seen much as there were cable cars that you couldn’t even see more than three in a row, because the clouds were so low. But it was really nice to be in the countryside. Like I really like Toulouse but I can’t deny that I’m a country boy at heart and so it was really nice to be out of a city and in the fresh air, with barely any people around for a while. And I enjoyed a break from the heat as well; the heavens opened the second I got to Lourdes (pun intended) and then it didn’t really stop all weekend, but was like being at home and seen as I’ve been suffering with the incessant heat it was a lovely break! On the bus back I was so tired from the travelling, sightseeing and walking that I fell asleep! It was a miracle (pun intended) that I woke up just as we arrived in Lourdes because who knows where I would have ended up else!

The Sunday night I went to the cinema in Lourdes to watch Je m’appelle Bernadette, which basically retold the Lourdes story. The film was in French and then the people with the most requested subtitles got subtitles too. So the man asked what subtitles I wanted and I was like, none it’ll be okay. But he seemed a bit concerned that I wouldn’t understand so I assured him it’ll be fine I don’t need subtitles, so then he put Dutch ones anyway, so proved I was fine.

A woman called Maryem took me back to Toulouse by covoiturage; she comes from a town in the Pyrenees called Luz-St-Saveur, which is somewhere where I stayed on holiday with my family when we were camping in France once! So we had a nice talk about the Pyrenees and about England, because her sister is doing an ERASMUS in Sheffield, lucky her. Just as we were about to leave the motorway we drove past a three car pileup, and there was one girl lying on the ground and another lad with his head in hands and blood everywhere. 100 meters later there was a car in a ditch whose bonnet was completely crushed and the airbag was out. Never seen a car crash properly before, so shook me up a bit to see. I remember that in French translation we did a translation that said France has twice the amount of accidents on the roads than the UK, scary times!

So now I’m safe and sound in Toulouse after a weekend away from it all. On Friday I’m cooking a full English breakfast for guests, so fingers crossed that it goes well. Cooked some epic breakfasts when my mate Jim has come to visit me in Durham and we did a really good one round his a few months ago. Unfortunately there won’t be any Staffordshire Oatcakes to have with the breakfast, so it won’t be as good as our normal ones. Plus I’ve only ever done one for two people before. Ah well, impossible n’est pas français!

A plus!