Les Velos

All over town there are velo stations where you can hire a bike for a day or an hour or whatever you like. There are 2 right near us and more just a couple of minutes away.

The idea is that you can pick up a bike wherever you like and put it back at a different place, then pick up another one somewhere else and come home.

We are JUST big enough to ride them if dad puts the seat down.

We rode around for about an hour, but we stayed mainly in the parks and walkways because Frances roads have lots of cars on them... and they drive fast!

The Broken down Castle/The Ruins

(I wanted to call this post the ruins but Tamati wanted to call it the broken down castle.... so it is called both!)

Last week we went and visited some friends of Mum and Dad in Saissac. After lunch we went to visit the local chateau (castle) which is really old! One of the rooms has been fixed up and is used for parties and stuff.

The castle is all broken but you are allowed to climb it and you can go down the path next to it and find the old village. It is so old you cant see any walls there is only one layer of bricks where the houses used to be - the houses only had one room.

It was fun to climb around and look at the old towers which used to be used to guard the village.

La Plage

La Plage is the french word for beach.

Just up the road the city council have set up a free temporary beach for summer. they have covered a couple of streets with sand and bought in a whole lot of cool stuff. Its all free and it lasts about 2 months.

We have been there twice now. They have rock climbing, slides, trampolines, a blow up water slide, a soccor field and other stuff to do. On Wednesday we went and buried ourselves in the sand.

Bastille Day

Monday was July 14 which is bastille day. They have lots of fire works on bastille day (they dont do guy fawkes here) and have big displays all over France.

In Toulouse the display was right opposite our maison so we had heaps of friends over for dinner and to watch the fire works.

The fire works didn't start until 10.30pm so it was really late. The fireworks were way biger than any fireworks we have ever seen (except for disneyland which still beats them all) and was done to music. They were doing diffent countries so played the english national anthem with red and blue fire works, the french one with red, white and blue and the italian with red, green and white. We could hear the music accross the river and some of the fire works were in shapes like hearts.

The photos didn't come out very well but here is one of us watching it

Tour de France

This morning the tour de france passed by our back door. We heard the first vehicles at 8am so rushed out to make sure we didn't miss anything. There were heaps of police around making sure no one was driving on the road. The "Caravane" went first which was a big parade that lasted about an hour and they threw lots of stuff out. We got hats, bags, armbands, keychains and stuff from the sponsors. Then there was a gap of about an hour and the cyclists went past. it took mabye 10 seconds and they were gone!! Mum and dad nearly missed the photos because they were so fast. But they managed a little bit - take a look.

Tonight we are going for a bbq at a friends place (the dad is from NZ) , and tomorrow we have people coming here to watch the Bastille Day Fireworks which we should be able to see really well from our deck.

Bye

Ariki and Tamati

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 minutes later

and this is what it looked like a couple of minutes later.

it kept going for another 15 minutes and then we had a "snowball" - really a hailball - fight with some people in other appartments. It was fun!