toulouse- the third chapter has begun.

I'm now in Toulouse doing my internship with Les Petits Freres. I have a lot of opinions on things here, so I...wrote...a lot...you don't have to read it all. It's more like therapy for me (and an assignment for my internship class).

First we must introduce...

Characters:

Florence: my contact at Les Petits Freres. She sets me up with everything I need. She’s really nice and speaks French real fast.

Noemi: the other BYU student intern here with me. She got here the week before me so she’s been a lifesaver in showing me the ropes. She’s also from Spain, which is really awesome.

Pierre: another student who works at Les Petits Freres. He’s Parisian, but speaks English incredibly well. Highly useful as a “Hey, how do you say this in French/I noticed this weird thing about this city, can you explain it?” resource.

Les Petits Freres des Pauvres: The charitable organization I work for. Basically what we do is go to elderly people’s homes and chat with them for a little while to see how they’re doing and keep them company. We have to go to people’s houses by ourselves so we’re given a map of Toulouse and public transportation, a metro pass, and a pat on the back.

Story:

Being in Toulouse has been most interesting. I arrived on Monday with my mom, and we ran around the centre ville for a bit. Tuesday afternoon I met with Florence at Les Petits Freres, where I’m working for the summer. She was very nice and really high energy.  For dinner we went out to eat at Pizza Pino, which was excellent. The room was air conditioned (hallelujah!). 

The next day my mom left for the airport at 7:00 AM. I was not too happy to be all by myself in this city. I packed up all of my stuff (and I have a ton…holy cow…probably will surpass the weight limit at the airport) and headed down Rue de Bonrepos (aka prostitute lane, totally sketchy area, never stay in hotels by train stations when you travel in Europe) and went over to Les Petits Freres. I was praying the entire time that no one killed or raped me on that seven minute walk. No one did, thank goodness. I’m still paranoid of that happening, by the way. Because I live in a two notches above sketch youth hostel where the hallway right by my room is dark and the fire door (why does Europe have so many fire doors? I’m talking to you, England.) always gets stuck shut because the magnet to keep it open has mysteriously stopped working the past day and a half. Noemi and I feel like we live in a mental hospital. Seriously, we are Leonardo Dicaprio in “Shutter Island” or something. That’s what it looks like in the hall.

Anyway, back to the narrative. I got to Les Petits Freres after I spent all morning crying at the hotel, because I’m terrified to be in Toulouse by myself and I’m sick of being in Europe, etc etc, and I was just begging my eyes to stop spewing forth water so Florence and Pierre didn’t think I was mentally unsound (I do live in a mental hospital after all). Noemi and I went out to lunch at this little pasta place which was quite delish and ate our food in a park downtown. In Toulouse it looks like you can actually sit on the grass (unlike Paris where all grass is forbidden). Pierre and I visited this nice old lady whom I’ll be visiting alone in the future. I was so nervous that when she asked me how I was doing I told her my name was Katie (en francais, my name is now “cat-e ahn-droose”). Way to impress with my awesome knowledge of French. Anyway, from that exchange I learned that in French “cake” is a type of…well, cake…that has little bits of fruit in it. Kind of like fruit pound cake. It’s pretty good. I then met up with Noemi, and we went to visit a lady who is originally Spanish but after the Spanish Civil War moved to Toulouse (a lot of people here have a similar story). They chatted in Spanish, so I spent the time pondering what to do with my education (conclusion: ???). The lady was a really famous singer in Toulouse and she had us listen to a cassette tape of her singing. I don’t speak any Spanish whatsoever, but I could very much appreciate how much talent she had. It was beautiful.

After the visit Noemi and I participated in les soldes. In France stores have coordinated sales (soldes) at specific times during the year. In Toulouse they run for five weeks in February/March and five weeks June/July. Wednesday was the first day of them. We hit up Zara’s, H&M, Mango, and I swear someplace else, but I can’t remember. I simply can’t stop myself from buying cardigans these days so I bought a black and white striped one from Mango. Adorable. And cultural (les soldes are so European!).

Oh, and here’s a little anecdote about my disaster with my room. I walked in the first day and was smacked in the face by the smell of smoke. I was not about to live in a smoke smelling room and come back with all this awesome European clothing that smells like Europe (people smoke everywhere). So I attempted twice to talk to someone in the office to get that switched. The second time the guy didn’t understand what I was saying at all. His English was bad, my nervous French is bad, it was just bad. He thought I was asking if I wanted to smoke in the room. I was like, “NON. Je ne fume pas, mais la chambre sent comme la fumeur! Je veux savoir si je peux changer la chambre!!!!”  (NO. I do not smoke, but the room smells like smoke. I want to know if I can change rooms.) And I’m like practically crying at this point. Finally I was like, I’m just going to come back tomorrow. So I did and the other guy was helpful and I finagled my way into the room next to Noemi’s. BAM. Take that stupid receptionist guy.

So now my room smells like the air freshener I bought at the Carrefour around the corner from the youth hostel. Ha.