Toulouse

Biggest coffee I've found so far in France!

Last weekend I visited Toulouse with Noémie, first to visit and stay at her grandparent’s house and then with her cousins (François’ sister), who are 18 (Joséphine) and 16 (Rose-Marie). It was SUPER FUN. We left Friday morning and took the train, then eventually meandered our way to the grandparents house – which was pretty hard because even though Noémie had been there before she has no sense of direction whatsoever so we got lost and had to ask a bunch of strangers where the tiny little street her grandparents live on is. When we finally found their house, they of course treated us like any normal grandparents would – and forced us to eat much more than we normally would have! Over our whole stay, I tried a whole bunch of new foods – rabbit, mussels, beets, and this jelly made of a fruit that I’ve never heard of before called a ‘coing’, or a quince in English I think? Noémie’s grandfather makes home made jams so it was super good!

The rest of the weekend we spent exploring the city and its sights, doing some shopping to find Noémie some new shoes so she would stop complaining about her feet hurt so much, and stopping every few hours to relax and have coffee in whatever café we stumbled upon. We also stayed over at Joséphine’s one night, so I got to meet her family for dinner, then meet a bunch of her friends and hang out with them later. Hanging out with them was like learning a whole other language though! Since I’ve been living with my host family I’ve picked up on a bunch of ‘familiar french’ words (slang) that they use every day, but being completely immersed and surrounded by students around my age the whole weekend made me pick up on a lot really quickly – which was good because at first I had almost no idea what half the words they were saying meant!

embarassing...this is for you Noémie!

So when we were out shopping we passed a sign for a little restaurant / smoothie place called Banana Land, and Noémie absolutely spazzed and demanded that I take a picture with the sign. Story behind that: when Isabelle first asked me what I liked to eat for breakfast so she would know what to buy me, I said I wouldn’t mind at all just eating cereal every morning with fruit. So when they finally realized that I liked bananas and that I put them on my cereal – god forbid with milk – they thought it was so weird! So now the whole family makes fun of me for eating bananas. Any time there’s any mention of a banana anywhere they go “DANA! YOUR FAVORITE FOOD! BANANA!!” So that’s what they introduce me as to their friends…the American who only eats bananas and is allergic to ‘preservatifs’ (from my extremely embarrassing first day faux-pas).