August...Part 1

It has been a bit since I have blogged. I figured that since I was living in France, I would take the typical French vacation during the month of August… from my blog. That being said, I will give some accounts of the past month that I have not blogged about.

Today, I will focus on the first week of August here in Toulouse.

We spent the first Saturday in August with some people we met at school.  It was a great evening of drinking some English beers and watching football at an English pub. A bonus to learning French at this school is meeting a lot of new and interesting people. The downfall is spending several weeks or months with them and then they leave. We have had our fair share of this in August.

The first Sunday of every month, Toulouse has free entrance to most of its museums in the city. We usually always partake in at least one museum on this day of each month and this time we tried two. First, we decided to visit the George Labit Museum. This museum was a bit of a walk for us on the Canal du Midi. This canal is a beautiful addition to Toulouse and will definitely be another blog posting by either Derek or myself. 

Canal du Midi

The walk into the courtyard immediate took us out of France and put us somewhere exotic with all the palm trees. 

The building itself is in the southern Spanish style that reminded us of Seville. The museum is dedicated to Asian arts, which I love, and is a bit small in size. It is worth a visit, especially on the first free Sunday.

The next museum is the Toulouse Natural History Museum and Botanical Garden. This is by far one of the biggest draws for families and is a rather large museum. The botanical garden takes one through all the common plants in Toulouse and Southern France, a majority being agricultural- corn, wheat, peppers, sunflowers, and tomatoes- and they are all along winding walking paths. 

A peacock in the Toulouse Botanical Garden

The inside is an amazing Natural History Museum. Toulouse has obviously spent some time with this museum. It has animations, light shows, and plenty of items to look at. Our time was cut short here, but it is definitely on list to go back to.

The first week of class started both of us in A2. Yes, somehow we advanced up a level. I don’t think we really had a choice, but it was a real eye opener. I think I came to Derek at the break with a freaked out look and told him that there was no way I was surviving in A2. Because of this sudden need to use even more brain cells, I had to get chocolate. We tried a different chocolate store (I believe that I need to try all the chocolate stores before finding my favorite) and the chocolate I chose had nougat and nuts inside which is popular here in France. It was delicious! The nougat was very complimentary of the dark chocolate, and I will definitely be going back anytime I need some chocolate intervention when learning French has me down.

That being said, the first week of August was an interesting way to start off my “congés” from my blog. To learn more about the French vacations, or vacances, click here to see a blog that has my husband’s take on them.