The past couple of weeks, I’ve been in Europe doing my regular trip to the Toulouse office. As with my previous trip, I tried to take advantage of being in Europe to spend some time with our two biggest partners. Which added a couple of days in the second week, and made the travel a fair bit more complicated!
They were setting up for a festival in front of the Place du Capitole.
The first week in Toulouse was pretty uneventful. I was traveling with two co-workers, Riley and Erica, and the week went by pretty quickly. We didn’t do a lot outside of work, so it was pretty routine. We were staying in Toulouse, at the same hotel I stayed at the first time I was here. It’s a good hotel – pretty standard, but comfortable. It’s about a 5 minute walk from the train station, which makes it convenient. Each day we’d get up, meet after breakfast and walk to the station.
A river boat on the River Garonne, in front of the Pont Neuf in downtown Toulouse.
The office is about a 15 minute train ride away, followed by a ~20 minute walk. As we had nice weather the whole week, that worked out well. We’d spend the day in the office, go out for lunch with one of the teams, then head home between 5 and 6 p.m. Then we’d do some work in our rooms, and go out for dinner around 8:00. They eat pretty late in France, so it made for some late nights.
Sunset over the River Garonne.
Late evening along the Garonne.
Riley was with us until Wednesday, when he flew home; Erica was there until Friday. We didn’t really do much the whole week. Thursday night, as it was Erica’s last night, we headed out a little earlier and walked around Toulouse, to see some of the sights. It’s a very pretty city, and we walked for a while before deciding on a restaurant for dinner. Friday was more of the same for me – not very exciting, I know.
You need to look up better pictures of this plane - the Airbus Beluga. Toulouse is where they assemble an number of the Airbus planes, and they use this monstrosity to deliver parts for assembly. This picture doesn't provide any real scale, but they can carry whole helicopters inside this thing.