And Outside The Rain Fell...

The warm evening having rapidly transcending to a cold night in the train, i woke up this morning feeling miserable and shivering.



Warming up to a Caramel coffee at the station, we were to spend time till 11.30, when we could catch our train to Carcassone. Having dumped our bags at the station, and with nothing much to do, we decided we'd walk around the city of Toulouse, a fairly small University town housing the EADS. It also housed several of my friends, who had left the previous night to Nice. Evidently, the whole of exchange WIMWI were criss-crossing paths with one another.



Walking randomly, we crossed several narrow streets to come across the huge city cathedral. What fascinated me more was the flea market immediately outside. People here were selling everything you could think of - knives, old grandfather clocks, hideous African masks, gaudy earrings, several hundred LPs (including a classic Johnny Cash one, several Pink Floyd), totem poles, the quintessential Asterix, an accordion player with a drunk bum dancing to his tune shouting "woo-lah" at every other note, ancient pocket watches, a drum, crockery and even a Suzuki Swift.



A sharp contrast to the hullabaloo of the market outside was the solemnity of the cathedral inside, though I did not choose to spend much time in it.



Not wanting to carry anything from the market place, we walked on further to find the town market situated outside the Capitol, and i noticed interesting patterns on the ground below, before realized they were the zodiac signs, embossed in brass and stone, radiating out from the square.



We proceeded on to a beautiful park, and i even sat on a oblong circular disk that was a kind of self propelled saucer at an incline. It was immense fun. I say this at the cost of sounding like a total kid, but that's that, you enjoy a few things and you don't enjoy a few more. This, i enjoyed completely.



Proceeding, we came across this massive monastery in one section of the town, where people got particularly scarce and the roads narrower. Plain, devoid of ornamentation and simple sense of aesthetics, this place was colossal. Huge pillars towered over a single prayer hall, with few chapel benches for prayer in one corner. Windows, several metres high had stained glass in various hues - red, blue, greens, yellows and azure. It gave the entire place the feel of a giant kaleidoscope, with me at one end peering through a hole, looking at it all in ardent fascination.



An exhibition by a Belgian artist in the complex premises particularly interested me. He had exhibited a huge dead horse, hanging by its hooves. Revolting at first, the beauty of what he depicted grew in, and he assured us, the horse wasn't real. Yet, standing centimetres close to it, I couldn't tell the difference between reality and artificiality. He explained about the significance of dead horses at a time when the French and Belgians were culturally bonded. It's something I must look up.



We left Toulouse for the ancient town of Carcassone, sight of amongst the best castles in Europe. Built in the 12th century, this castle had been painstakingly restored in the 19th century by one Viollet le Duc, and today, intact and beautiful, it gave us the feeling that this is the kind of castle you would see in photographs of Europe. True castle towers, a complete moat, and several little streets within the castle that sold some amazing souvenirs – paladin and knight figurines, pistol and bracelets, gleaming cavalry swords – it was as if all of Carcassone was preparing us to go into battle. The enormity of the castle was baffling, with towering walls and corridors that spanned the perimeter of the castle. PritS was particularly fascinated that day by “sugar” poses, I with French windows and Patwa ji with “hiking” up the cliff on which the castle stood.



To be honest, after the Scandic North, few things now fascinated me so much now as did this castle. Scandinavia set an extraordinary high benchmark for us, and I guess the rest of Europe can now only match up.



Soon down, we decided to catch a train around 6, and as we waited watching the city go by, we saw in action the fascinating system of a “lock” linking the river which was at two different levels, as yachts and private boats moved from a lower level to a higher level. A most ingenuous system indeed.



We reached Toulouse, intending to leave for Paris the next day, to capitalize on the “First Sunday of October”, a day when every museum and attraction in Paris was to be free. Dinner was a super large pizza at a steal-away price, and sleep was on the reclining chairs of the CoRail train, we were finally going back home. Paris.