Thursday, June 5, 2008

Some Culture

This week we have tried to experience some French culture

On the weekend we decided to go and see some of Toulouse. First we went to the Victor Hugo markets; which is a big food market on the bottom floor of a car park building. It had all sorts of fresh food, and some pre-made that you could buy. We saw pizzas, lasagne and snails in a tomato sauce... kind of like snail stew.... we didn’t think we would try that!

On the 1st floor they have heaps of restaurants that only serve food made from the fresh food downstairs. There were probably 20 different restaurant “stalls”. We had lunch at one.
Then we went to the Museum Augustine which was an art museum (it was all old art and statues which we didn’t really get!) but it was in a building that looks like Harry Potters school which was cool.

After that we went to one of the parks, there was a Japanese garden that looks like it was built by the same people that made Hamilton’s one! It has the same house and lake... then we saw this cool dragon sculpture in the lake at the park.

Today we accidently experienced some more French culture. Apparently the French are famous for their strikes and at the moment they are protesting the high oil prices... so what they do, to get on TV, is they block up all the motorways. 2 or 3 or 4 trucks (1 for every lane) get side by side and drive really sloooowwwlyyyy so no one can get where they need to go on time. This morning it took 1 hour to get to school which is only 14km away. This doesn’t seem to worry any of the French people, because they are used to it, and the teachers didn’t mind because everyone was late.

2 comments:

RowenaH said...

Hi Ariki & Tamati,
Your blog rocks! It sounds like you're having a fantastic time.
I was excited to read that you went to the Victor Hugo markets because I think he wrote Les Miserables, which is a really difficult book to read but was made into a wonderful musical that's one of my favourites.
Take care, arohanui, Rowie xo

Anonymous said...

Hi Ariki and Tamati, Rochelle here. What a fantastic blog page, sounds like your having an absolute blast. School sounds really neat, no school bags and you get to wear slippers - my kids would love that.
Say hi to mum and dad from all of us, Dean, rochelle, Steven, Dylan, Rhapsody, Rawenata and Rhezyn.