Lost in Toulouse
Toulouse's Town Hall, the Capitole, was built 500 years ago as the seat of local power. Hundreds of years of grand renovations have created a majestic, over-the-top, brick-and-stone monument on a landmark plaza of arcades.
It was, in short, the perfect cultural experience for those who, like me, find their attention spans cut way down to size by the delightful combination of rich food and stout red wine in the afternoon.
Toulouse prides itself on its food (its specialty is cassoulet), and visitors can stock up on fresh produce at the Victor Hugo Market.
(Robert V. Camuto)
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On the second story of the town hall, the Salle des Illustres is a 19th-century gallery of immense paintings, windows and faux-marble columns. Painted in the center of the arched ceiling is a bare-breasted, haloed Marianne (the symbol of the Republic of France, apparently not deprived of her cassoulet in this fleshy rendition) leading the French army in a chariot pulled by lions. As a devil flies overhead -- no subtlety here -- an angel soars up to Marianne with a sword.
For the remainder of the afternoon, our son went off with our friends, and my wife and I walked down to the Garonne alone. We crossed the red brick bridge, the Pont Neuf, to the Chateau d'Eau, an early 19th-century water tower that's been transformed into a modern photography gallery. We then took one of the small streets leading away from the Garonne and wandered.
"Let's get lost," my wife said, and we did.
For the next few hours we walked whichever way the mood struck us. Away from the commercial places, we walked along quiet, crooked streets. We stopped in art galleries, a piano maker's workshop, a tea room, vintage clothing stores and a stereo shop that sold custom-made tube amplifiers using, as were informed in English, "only old technology."
Just up the street from the 16th-century church of Notre-Dame la Dalbade, we passed a potter's studio -- doors flung open and blaring a jazz trio's CD. In the back of the studio, a huge troll of a man was kneading a large piece of clay. A massive ocher urn near the entrance bore a price sticker that said only "cher" ("expensive"). We met the artist, who in a few minutes of conversation riffed on the state of modern jazz and then on some of his peeves -- from noise-sensitive neighbors who were shutting down Toulouse's music clubs to George W. Bush (all the usual and then some). As we left, we noticed in the window a sign hand-lettered in black marker: "All the pots," it said, "guaranteed deaf."
French in Space
Our last stop was just outside town at Cite de l'Espace, Toulouse's multi-lingual space park, which includes a scale model of the Russian space station Mir, space travel simulations, a planetarium and some excellent interactive exhibits on the future of space exploration. The goal was to please the 10-year-old in our family, and in that it succeeded.
Lest we forget, or very likely in case you didn't know, France has the world's third-largest space program.
The United States may have put the first man on the moon, but it took the French to improve the food in space. Jean-Francois Clervoy, an astronaut who considers Toulouse his home town and a member of several international missions, including the 1999 Hubble telescope rescue mission aboard Discovery, is credited with serving the first out-of-this-world Southwestern French dinner, complete with foie gras.
