Time Out In Toulouse

Two hours down the road from Clermont is the fourth largest city in France  Sitting on the banks of the Garonne river is the centre of the European aerospace industry - home of Airbus and the Galileo satellite, an old and venerable centre of learning – its University founded in 1229, a city featuring World Heritage listed sites such as the Canal du Midi and the Basilica Saint Sernin, a place famous for its saucisson, a town known as La Ville Rose due to its singular pink brick buildings – a town called Toulouse.  It is NOT the birth place of celebrated Impressionist painter Toulouse Lautrec (that’s Albi).

We thought it was time we pay such an interesting place a visit and what better way to do it than to celebrate my mum’s birthday!  So we packed our overnight bags, packed the dogs too (yes, dogs allowed at the delightful Hôtel de France), packed into the Punto and drove off to Toulouse.

And how glad we were that we did!  It was a charmed visit from beginning to end.  The hotel was ideally placed next to Place Wilson (its statue and fountain honouring the poet Pierre Goudouli) in the centre of the old town, but more importantly featured rooms whose décor I approved and the staff were most welcoming to Roly and Pepper. 

Alex found happiness straight away in the form of a Chocolate Market a few steps from the hotel, where one is encouraged to stroll around and eat as much chocolate as is offered to you.  We were there quite a while....

Walking around, the architecture of Toulouse captured the imagination, its famous ‘pink’ brick buildings making for a quite unusual and very attractive cityscape.  The bricks are a reddish pink, rather long and narrow and look very handmade.  Paired with the blue-grey louvered shutters, they give Toulouse its distinctive, romantic French look.  I loved the shutters, and prefer them to the solid shutters I’m used to seeing. The louvers lend the windows and buildings a ‘just resting’ look, rather than the ‘shut down’ or abandoned effect the solid shutters give. And how evocative is sunlight slanting though shutters and creating patterned angles onto a parquet floor!

In our (not long enough) stay we wandered the winding streets, window shopped in the luxe designer boutiques, drank slightly better coffee than we have become accustomed to, ate fresh viennoiserie at a corner café in the crisp morning air and listened to chain smoking locals discussing politics and football.

We bought a crazy coat and a character confiture pot at the marche aux puces under the eaves of St. Sernin, listened to a world class choir rehearsing a requiem in that Romanesque basilica built in 1080, watched diners queueing for dinner at L’Entrecôte restaurant not once but twice in one night (it’s their secret sauce apparently..) and ate Italian food just to be contrary.

We cruised the Canal du Midi leisurely moving up and down the locks and watching the city slip quietly by, sipped the most expensive glass of wine we have yet encountered in France in a bistrot overlooking the Pont Neuf, bought roses and rings, cakes and crêpes, wrapped up warm in the morning and sun basked by lunch time, walked and walked and walked, ate and talked and, at the end of the day, slept like logs in our shuttered bedrooms.

It was memorable and very appealing. Made us wonder if this could be the place for us?  It certainly has a lot to recommend it and we thrived on its big city feel.  For now, though,  we will continue to focus on our chosen spot of Marseillan as we have an idea, a plan, that could well furnish us with our future (yes, we do have to think of making a living somehow!) and that hinges on Marseillan.  Should that change however, I think we will be most certainly making another visit to la ville rose that is Toulouse.