Parlez-vous anglaise?

Bonjour! Yes, I am in France right now. Paris to be exact. But before I go into the many, many things I've been up to in Paris let me blog a little about Toulouse. The place in France I went to.

I stayed with my friends' Ferlynda and Eric. Ferlynda says that if Paris is KL then Toulouse is Ipoh. It's a nice small French town in the south of France. On my first night there Eric cooked a typical Southern dish for me. Duck confit, preserved duck with potatoes and beans.

It was delicious. The duck is the meat of stuffed duck or the ducks that foie gras comes from. No, we didn't have any foie gras. The duck is quite fatty because foei gras ducks are force fed to give you that rich liver. I pretended that I didn't know this.

My first night in France was also the first night that I ate real French bread for the first time. Eric and Ferlynda took me into the little town with their two sons and we bought fresh bread from the little boulangerie.

Eric broke off a piece for me in the road. I've heard the best way to tell if French bread is good is to listen for the cracking sound it makes when you squeeze it. It really made that noise when he broke off a piece.

The next day I took the Metro with Ferlynda to the centre of Toulouse with the kids. This is where I ate French fries in France! Hehehee. I know lame. And sort of blasphemy to eat McDonald's in France but the kids wanted fries so who was I to refuse the chips offered to me.

I stayed in town to explore after Ferlynda headed home. I wanted to see the Musee des Augustins, mostly for the thrill of seeing something with my surname. It's a small little museum but seriously it took me hours and hours to find it.

I'm already handicapped with a lousy sense of direction (can someone please buy me a GPS system please), to add to this no one speaks English in Toulouse. Literally, parlez-vous anglaise (about the only thing I know how to say in French) didn't help at all. It could be the most useless French phrase ever.

Everytime I asked someone if they spoke English they would say no and I would still try and get directions. This resulted in me getting French directions and hand gestures. I as about to give up until I called Ferlynda and she told me the general direction in which to head to. I was in roughly the right area but I still couldn't find it.

I bought a bottle of water from a French lady who also couldn't speak English but I could kind of guess from what she was saying that I was very close. She told me through French and hand gestures to go straight and the museum would be on my right. FINALLY! I found it.

So was it worth it? I'd say yes. It's a small museum, it's housed in a former monastery with a central garden. It feels like going into someone's house, that someone having a very extensive art collection.

They had sculptures from various French artists and pieces of carved biblical scenes by an unknown artist. The paintings were from the French and Italian school of painting. They also had some cool gargoyles in the corridor you first enter.

I'm mostly proud of being able to find the damn place! I was supposed to stay in Toulouse until the 28th but Eric and Ferlynda were taking the kids to Disneyland in Paris on Thursday. They gave me the option of staying in their house or leaving for Paris earlier.

I opted for the latter since it was okay with Izan that I arrived earlier in Paris. So I went to get a new train ticket and it was off to Paris! Turned out to be a good idea since I've been doing stuff non-stop since I got here. More on my Parisian adventures later.