| Sunday, July 20, 2003 |  |
| Another hot day |
 So, we're beginning to sleep and wake up at normal times. Haven't started seriously looking for places to live yet, but will in a couple of days. I don't know if the first step will end up being in one of the more idyllic areas I'd prefer to live in, or it will just be in a suburb of Toulouse, but we'll see. My older daughter, for one, is a bit horrified about the thought of getting to live in a town that might not have a sufficient number of night clubs. And, well, Toulouse has a very lively night life, being populated to a large extent by students.
Toulouse isn't all that practical to get around in by car. Several times we've spent an hour inching around in circles on narrow one-way streets, looking for a parking spot, only to finally find it and realizing it actually was within walking distance of our hotel. No wonder people are riding scooters and walking here. There is a heat wave here. Hot and humid. Mid thirties, centigrade. Oh, it is survivable, and it seems to be somewhat unusual, even for the summer here. But air condition isn't something that is ubiquitous. My online activities are seriously hindered by only having a dial-up connection to a local number for Earthlink, which costs me around $10 per hour. We didn't succeed in finding an open cybercafe yet. So normal blogging is just about out of the question for a while. I think I fried my airport base station by plugging in the adaptor without checking that it worked on 220 volts, and I think I broke my digital camera by dropping it on cement. But somehow I don't care. Yesterday we drove down to the Mediterranean and went swimming by the beach at Narbonne. And on the way back we hung out a bit in the Cite of Carcassonne, which is what is on the picture. It is the most complete remaining fully fortified town from the middle ages. Although I believe its restoration in the 1850's is somewhat controversial. [ Diary | 2003-07-20 14:22 | 10 comments | PermaLink ] More > |