Last Day in France

It was expected to be a rainy day in this region of France today but we woke up to a nice sunrise in the eastern sky. While it was a beautiful surprise, it turned out to symbolize a day where nothing was going to be quite as we expected.

First, Ryan had planned to work in our hotel room for the morning. It was interrupted by a fire alarm that had us down in the streets for a while.

Second, we planned to go to the Toulouse-Lautrec Museum, a highlight of Albi, when we checked out of the hotel at noon. We had checked its hours just to be sure. When we got there, we found out they were closed for lunch for two hours!

Third, we decided we’d take a motorized tram around Albi to help fill in this sudden void we had in the middle of the day and found that it also closed down for over two hours for lunch.

Walking around a bit, we stumbled upon a stairway leading up to cloisters of a monastery. We had walked by the steps many times before and never noticed what they led to. So, the extra time was fruitful in this way.

Then, we decided we’d go to a restaurant we’d heard good things about for lunch. It was close to the boyhood home of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec so we could do those both in one fell swoop. Turns out, you can only look at the outside of the home – it’s interior is not open to the public. At least the restaurant was open so we headed there next.

The restaurant was nice but we felt like we could not understand the server or what items were on the menu. She stuck to trying to explain them verbally in French without a paper menu to look at, and why shouldn’t she? We were in France after all. It was like a comedy of errors. It made us feel like we had made no progress at all in our French during our time here, and this was our last day! We had felt the same way at the museum earlier trying to figure out why we were able to buy a ticket and get access but were being told the museum was closed. We had felt the same way at the tourism office trying to figure out what we could do since we weren’t able to go to the museum as expected. It was a little bit like being in a twilight zone. Thankfully, Ryan does always manage to figure out a way toward understanding between himself and the native French speakers.

The meal turned out to be good and it lasted long enough that we only needed to kill about fifteen minutes before the museum reopened. There was a beautiful park adjacent to the museum so we viewed that while we waited. Finally, we were able to get back to the museum and see the Toulouse-Lautrec collection that we had been looking forward to and we really enjoyed it.

From there, it was time to head back to the Toulouse airport, about an hour’s drive, where we are spending the night before our morning flight to Portugal tomorrow. The only thing that didn’t work right during this portion of the day was that we couldn’t get any of our credit cards to work when we needed to refuel our rental car before turning it in. But, like everything else today, we were finally directed to a gas station where our cards worked. None of these issues today were really important in the scheme of things and it’s all part of experiencing parts of the world that are different from what we’re used to back home. And, really that’s what we’re looking for when we leave the United States and head overseas. Mission accomplished!