Toulouse - observations of a New Zealander

So, we are in the 'south of France'. Before I moved here, those words held for me images of fields of lavender, a gazillion grapevines, long, warm, sunny, lazy days, and Peter Mayle getting exasperated with the builders. Now I realise that from one kilometre to the next the landscape changes and from one 'departement' to the next the loyalties, customs and local delicacies change too.

Toulouse is a lovely city. It is OLD and is called la ville rose (the pink city) for the reddish coloured bricks that many buildings are constructed with; they seem to have a pinky-red glow, particularly in the evening sun.

We live to the south-east of Toulouse in a smallish town of Ramonville St-Agne which is a mixture of gorgeous, practical, functional, and sometimes rather surprising architecture. Although I have to say that after two years here I don't notice that rather surprising architecture so much now; rather I just see how practical the buildings are for the intense summer sunshine and the jolly old winter chills. Certainly the newer houses (not the tumble-down old stone farm houses) are built with heat in mind: to protect you from it in the summer, and to retain it in the winter. 

But it is the tumble-down old stone farm houses that turn my head. I love them. I love that they are built out of natural straight-out-of-the-earth products, and that sometimes even a massive great stone can be incorporated as the building takes shape.

Brongely, a village in the Pyrenees mountains

I don't know if I am unusual in this but when I go to little villages or walk through the really old part of Toulouse city my breathe is quite simply whisked away. It is all Just So Beautiful. The colours, the 'grand nature', the timelessness of the buildings, the fact that people have lived and worked in these places for centuries; it's all just a bit much sometimes and I feel like laughing and crying. And remember I grew up in a raw, young country (New Zealand); still in the process of finding its way in the world and forming an identity, developing a culture to call its own (blending European, Maori, Asian and Pacific Island - etc - cultures together), and just being at ease with itself. All of this without centuries of embedded history behind it, like France.

(NOTE: New Zealand was inhabited by Polynesian Settlers who were estimated to have arrived in approximately 1350. New Zealand was formed as a nation when Maori and the Europeans settlers signed a founding document, The Treaty of Waitangi, in 1840. This is celebrated with a national holiday every year on 6 February, and is called 'Waitangi Day'.)

I have had the privilege of being part of the Toulouse Walking Tours, run by Elyse Rivin, who is  unofficially The Most Knowledgeable Person On The City That Is Toulouse that I have ever met. I've seen lots of glorious old wonders through her tours, and been to parts of the city I would not have otherwise wandered through. For example, there is (still) a place in an old Roman amphitheatre here in Toulouse called a 'vomitorium'. I'm guessing that it had something to do with the volume of ruby-coloured alcoholic beverages and quantities of foie gras hamburgers those Romans used to drink and eat (my thoughts only, as I'm not sure the Romans were actually scoffing that much foie gras).

More on my observations to follow.