Toulouse, Cat'Art, Ste Columbe

I may or may not have almost been thrown out of here for screaming "BIJOU!"

I knew that I had successfully left Paris when strangers started to speak to me on the trains and buses. I met a very nice guy on the train to Toulouse who wanted to talk (and eventually confessed that he wanted to practice his English). I was happy to oblige and to not try to speak French.

He was the nicest French person I've met so far and he told me about life in his village where for 200 people there were only two things, church and rugby. I told him about New York and his eyes got big in excitement and fear and I tried to explain to him how midtown Manhattan (his dream destination) wasn't a street or building, but many of them. We exchanged e-mail addresses, but in his excitement, we never got each other's names. He offered me a place to stay if I needed it and said that we could take trips into Toulouse to hit on the college girls.

I stopped in Toulouse to walk around a bit and to eat some Ass Kabab.

Lesson VII of Rosetta Stone Level I taught me that plate is "assiette" in French.

There was a little French fair with happy little French children.

On the bus from Toulouse to the artist's residence in Ste Columbe I met a man from Morocco named Mohammed and he was drunk at 3 P.M. from his fishing expedition and his English was terrible. To everyone's annoyance, he showed me how he caught and gut a fish and made it into his lunch. By this point, I had given up on blending in. There was a beautiful French girl a few rows behind us both and he kept goading me to ask her out, telling me things to go over and say to her in case she didn't speak English. My French is poor, but I am relatively sure these lines would have gotten me slapped. Pretty sure she heard them anyway.

Despite explaining my mission here, he invited me to stay with him and we would paint the village rouge. He seemed offended that I turned him down and gave me his phone number in English and French and the bus driver practically shut the door on him as he tried to get me to ask the French girl out for something that didn't like sound like a meal or coffee on his way off of the bus.

I arrived at the bus stop and I was met there by the administrator of the center, who took me to the village where they were having a welcoming dinner in my honor...which also happen to coincide with someone else's leaving, so in reality, I was not special. I put my bags down and used the pissoir and saw Kevin (whom I may have mentioned before), the poet from my workshop in Prague three summers ago. We had fallen out of touch, but I applied here in April and he Facebooked me in May, and we figured out that if I made the trip, our timing would coincide. Naturally, it made sense for us to share a house together.

The buildings for the residence used to be a comb factory.

There are nine total artists at the center, some from New York, Paris, Ireland, Russia, and a few random people who live in town and rent the studios. Everyone here is really cool, I've found it much different than the poetry workshop in Prague which was essentially an academic pissing contest. There are poets, sculptors, painters, writers, and everything in-between. Everyone is ambitious and well-accomplished and I've marveled at the projects that they each are undertaking. Speaking of projects...

In order to apply here, you send in samples of a project you are working on (one that a haven of quiet and serenity would benefit). I now have a substantial amount of work written from my adventures last summer, which is what I initially applied to work on here. So that's what I am doing with all the time in the world.