Toulouse

The trip here: Air Transat is great - flights are always on time, meals are free and they come with wine, and the movies are usually good. Cedar Ridge at 3:00am after having had little sleep for 2 or 3 nights, was was right up my alley. And unlike a certain other airline which seems often to be about to strike or on strike or ordered back to work, Air Transat has never lost my luggage.

Our arrival: It's good to arrive in the morning: if you're from France the door-locking system in Toulouse might be straight forward, but for us it was challenging, actually impossible.  First we were locked out, then we were locked in.  This was our first experience renting an apartment, and so far it wasn't going well!  Eventually we nabbed a young chap coming down from an apartment upstairs, and he showed us the ropes and away we went .. feeling just a little bit leary about whether we'd be able to get back into our place.

Here are a couple of pics of the apartment - a 17th century building:

The kitchen

Daniel at the dining room table - check out the maple leaf art

The kitchen with the ceiling

I will never again mock people who don't know how to use a microwave. We struggled with the induction stove, the TV, and for a little while we couldn't find the bedroom (which is big, but behind a wall). I haven't touched the microwave yet.

Our first day we explored. We finished the day with a tapas dinner. We always have problems with the "rules of dining" in France. This time, we apparently had sat ourselves in the wrong section and therefore could not have "just" tapas - at least one of us had to order an entre.  It didn't matter that the listed entres were identical to the tapas, just larger portions.  So we ordered an entre to share, then had tapas and everyone was happy.  We walked back to our apartment, let ourselves in without any difficulty this time, and called it a day.

It's actually now our second day here, but the blog learning curve has been steep. It's 00h30, Oct 1, but our netbook still thinks it's yesterday, 18h30.