Chez Peter

Yesterday was a gorgeous sunny day, and quite warm too in the sun. I had arranged to meet Peter at his new apartment, prior to a quick cafe/bar tour of the town centre. His new apartment is very close to the Capitol Square and is pretty cool. It's on two levels with two double bedrooms, and there's a little mezzanine floor between the two proper levels. It's on the third floor of a side street, so will propably be far enough removed from the main square to be quiet in the evenings. He also has a great view onto the street below where there are numerous cafes and handy shops. He is now bound by a 3 month notice period though, so he'll be hoping our jobs are more secure than we think they are, and at 800 euros a month, the 2 months of rent he will forfeit otherwise is a tidy sum. He'd had time to do some shopping anyway, so the afternoon started with some wine.

Next was a cafe bar in another little square just off from the Capitol Square, where we sat outside in the sun. We both ordered what I would describe as duck pie, but which in French sounded much more appealing, and proportionately more expensive. I've now given up expecting the food and drink to be at the bargain end of the price range. The blonde beer we had to accompany it (blonde means lager over here) was typically expensive, even though it was just Heineken. This is a pain, as it's no better than you'd get anywhere else in Europe, but at least when buying the food I can console myself that it is very good. We stayed here until the sun ducked behind the buildings, when it became too cold to sit outside, and then tramped off to the nearest Irish Bar, of about 5 in Toulouse. Unlike the English bar we had previously visited, but which had no detectable English people in it, this Irish bar was definitely full of Irish. There were also plenty of locals, but it was quite incredible to see what could have been my local in Manchester at one point. I'm sure it even had the same two Irish girls in the corner commisserating each other on being football widows.

We finished the evening by wandering into a French bar where there was just one bloke stood at the end. He was very friendly and between his broken English and our crap French, we had a bloody good time. He introduced us to a French drink which is very popular in the South and which I'd heard about at work - pastis. It's basically oozo, and is drunk the same way as the Greeks drink that, ie mixed with water if you're not daft. We had a lot of these over the course of the next hour or so, which probably explains a lot about how I felt when I woke up this morning.

Getting a taxi home at the end of the night seemed harder than it should have been. The first 3 drove off as soon as they realised there might be a lanuguage problem. Whether this was entirely language based at this point, I'm not sure, but it took about 20 minutes or so before I was on my way home...