"We apologize for the delay. . ."

Hey gang.  I got a little behind over the past two weeks.

The fact is that this trip is a bit of an experiment -- it's the longest time I've spent on the road where I've tried to both write AND work remotely for 70-80% of the week while traveling, and that's turning out to be quite a challenge.  Let's say that, taking the positive view, work gave me some opportunities to be helpful that I wasn't expecting and that curtailed my writing muse a little bit.

(Truthfully some of that was due to work that I intended to accomplish before my departure and left unfinished.)

Where were we?

Ah, right, Toulouse!

Sunday we had another day of exploring -- Rachel and I had another pastry as breakfast, and then it was off to Toulouse to explore The Church of the Jacobins.  Which is a church and convent abbey sortof thing.  Anyway, the Dominican monks and friars were an order that was permitted to mix with the city, so their center was right in the heart of town.

... and recruit other people to be poor with them -- It's tiptop!

So they have a beautiful building dead in the middle of the city and an idyllic little courtyard to match.   It's also the final resting place of (most of) the bones of St. Thomas Aquinas.  I failed to take a picture, but the little house that was used to transport his skull during it's recent tour of the US* is there, sadly empty because the skull is back with the other shards of him they've managed to retain. Catholicism is truly in the running for most-metal religion.

*aside: holy-hell how did I not know that the relics of saints still go on tour?!  Do you have to buy tickets?  Would bring new meaning to the term "Scalping" I suppose. . . 

Ahem.  Anyway.

The building itself was stunning -- it had been converted into an army barracks to house Napoleon's forces at once point, and then, after some restoration, was used to hide and safeguard museum pieces that had been moved from Paris before the occupation in WW2.

Check out this single column supporting . . . A Very Large Number Of Arches (which has become known as "The Palm Tree of the Jacobins*")

About that name -- if you know your French history, you probably associate that name with the French political group that was so influential during the revolution.

Turns out that as the political party was growing in Paris they rented a refectory as a meeting house, which had been the home of the Dominican Friars known as Jacobins (who had gotten that nickname because they got their start in Paris on Rue Saint-Jacques, and been nicknamed "Jacobins" as a result, and that nickname then spread outwards across France).  The name transferred to the blossoming political party in the 1700s and stuck.

In any case their courtyard was lovely.

They did seem to be trying to lay brick specifically to antagonize me though.

I stopped in one corridor and remarked to Rachel that the uniformity of the bricks was giving me the shakes.

What even?  Did you guys have a way to make uniform height and depth bricks but they had to be arbitrary lengths?  Why.

And then I turned around and saw this.  And I know, I know, that there must have been a doorway here or something at some point but with this amount of weathering and age on the structure it sure looks like that's not the case and this is just malice aforethought.  

Me, minding my own business:

Some Dominican in, I don't know, 1417: "I have a great idea, let's give an engineer in the 21st century a mild stroke. That'll be my legacy."

REALLY?

So afterwards we wandered the streets of Toulouse for the afternoon.

It's a gorgeous town, with a lot more red roman brick than much of France, which is why the French call it La Ville Rose ("The Pink City").

Like most large French cities, water features heavily into the town and there are some great elevation changes, in the process of our wander we found ourselves the tiniest, most practical bridge.

I also stopped to take a picture of another, practical but less picturesque thing.

One of the problems of any city is public urination -- and in a society with a drug problem that tries to solve that problem with prohibition and criminalization, that problem gets far worse, because you can't offer the public small private spaces to relieve themselves without those private spaces also being used by folks who don't have a private space of their own and need a place to consume drugs out of the public eye.

So public stairwells that double back on themselves tend to often wind up smelling awful because the sightlines make them prime candidates to be impromptu urinals for folks who just need a place to pee.

This is especially bad because the instinct is to pee in the corners, because you're most-out-of-view and it feels most discreet, but this is the worst because it means rain will have the least success washing the urine away after the fact.

So, enter these brilliant devices, which keep piss from building up in the corners of the stairs by . . . diverting that piss back onto the feet of anyone stupid enough to try to use the corners to pee. 

Brilliant.

Five minutes later we walked into a gorgeous church and I took a picture of one of the most aesthetic Pipe Organs I've ever seen.  I'm not sure I should be allowed to own a camera.

Also brilliant.

We received word during the day that Rachel's bag would be arriving in the late afternoon/early evening, so rather than stay out for dinner we returned to our Airbnb and grabbed an assemblage of ingredients so Rachel could prepare a riff on this excellent salad from Smitten Kitchen.

It was really good, and after a couple days of rich food something light and fresh was exactly what we both craved.

Rachel's bag arrived!  We took a short nap, got dressed, and went out dancing again.

It was lovely.