Tour of Toulouse
Saturday June 2, 2007

         My jet lag is still amazingly here which is suprising to me because I thought it would be gone by the first day. I just can't keep on a constant schedule. I fell asleep earlier around 8:00 and while I was sleeping people went out to some party which I missed. They're still there so I'm just sitting here bored.
         This morning I woke around 8:00 and wandered around the main street in front of my dorm for a couple of miles. My main goal was to find some toothpaste, deoderant, and shampoo since my toothpasted and deoderant were accosted from me in the Austin airport. Apparently the terrorists are attacking with toothpaste and deoderant. It's hard to ask for these things without knowing French and apparently in France you don't just wonder into a store and look for things on your own. The people at the store kept asking me what I wanted. That was alright though. It was hard to describe things, except shampoo because luckily that's a French word. Toothpaste was tricky, I just made a brushing motion and said toothpaste. They thought initially I wanted a brush but eventually understood what I wanted. I was really nervous that what I had wasn't toothpaste and that I'd be brushing my teeth with skin oitment or something even scarier. I have learned now that dentrifice is toothpaste. Deoderant was even tricker because I guess it's not just a steotypical joke that French do not use deoderant. They gave me this small item that works like a ball-point pen. There's a small plastic ball which holds deoderant liquid on the opposite side so you roll it around and deoderant gets on the ball. It is "Non Parfume" though and smells just like pure alcohol, but seems to work. Oh well.
         In the afternoon I got on a bus to go to a scheduled tour given by one of the professors from Insa. I met a couple of the guys in my program on the bus and we went to McDonalds. Know that if you ever go to a McDonalds in France that "to go" or "to stay" is not only whether it's in a bag or not but is a price difference as well. They charge you extra to stay and, I guess, use their superperb dining area. We got our's to go but decided to eat outside on the tables outside. A security guard came up to us soon after we sat down and started talking to us in French but we can only assume he was telling us to leave because of this horrible crime we had committed.
         The tour was alright. I saw a lot of cool stuff: the Capitole where everyone gets married because French law requires you to get married at the town hall. So we saw a lot of different weddings happening there. We saw some really nice churches there, the names of which I have forgotten so none of those pictures are up yet because I don't like having unlabled pictures. After the tour I met up with Paul who had been on trains for the last 32 hours. Someone had thrown himself in front of the train he was on to commit suicide which apparently is a fairly common thing to do on this one stretch of track. They stopped the train and had an investigation. We went back to the dorm after I was a moron and wasn't sure of which stop to get off at so we had a long walk which I felt bad about since he still had all of his luggage. I kept offering to help him with it but he refused. Once we got back to the dorm I just collapsed and didn't wake up till now.

This is a Virgin Records which was across the steet from the McDonalds we ate at.

This is a statue of Fermat in the Capitole which I thought was neat.

This is a painting right underneath the Fermat Statue.

This is the roof in a room next to the room with the painting and Fermat. This is where all the wedding were headed and our tour group had to get in and get out quickly between weddings that were happening.