Our Blog - June 2017 Museum Sunday

One of the things we really like about living in Toulouse is that every 1st Sunday of the month, all of the museums of the city are FREE. I was mentioning to Tom that ..why would anybody who actually lives here ever PAY to go into a city museum? Today, we did a set of things:

• The archeological Museum, Museum of Saint-Raymond
• Lunch at the Victor Hugo market (see below)
• Stopped by Place du Capitole for the Fete de Rugby (see below)
• Then visited the Convent of the Jacobins

There is a covered market here named Marche Victor Hugo, and one of the unique things about this market is that above the market itself is a set of restaurants (well, 5 restaurants to be exact). They only serve lunch, and only on the days that the market is open. We did a lunch there last month, and so we decided to go back on Sunday again for another lunch. They tend to be BIG lunches, since all of them have a prix-fixe for 20 euros (or so) that is entree+plat+dessert. It was PACKED this day, so we ended up just picking one that had a couple tables open. I started with a salad landaise, with a bit of a twist. A landaise salad is basically a speciality salad from the French department of Landes, which is on the Atlantic Ocean, way down near Spain. It is a fairly normal salad with then this has thin slices of duck along with duck gizzards. Needless to say, I requested mine without any gizzards (it took me a few times to get the server to understand "no gizzards" (in French no less .... sans gesiers) and finally the gentleman sitting next to us pronounced it properly so that she understood. It also had a little slice of foie gras on top. Tom had a set of spring/summer vegetables that were grilled and put together.

Then the main course, I went for the cassoulet Maison, which is a local specialty of Toulouse and the Occitan region. It is basically a white bean casserole, slow cooked with "typically" pork sausages, mutton, and duck. Tom was going for the lamb, but they were out and replaced with a nice faux-filet (a sirloin steak) with fries. Both were really good with the steak being cooked perfectly and it included an anchovy sauce in the little white cup in the middle.

And of course, we do go ahead and do desserts once or twice a week, and so today it was a panna cotta with red fruit coulis on top, and a salted caramel mouse.

Saturday and Sunday was also the Fete du Rugby (Festival of Rugby) in the Place du Capitole. I had seen them setting up some things on Thursday while I was having coffee with some ladies. They had a variety of activities Saturday and Sunday, including this, which was a friendly/easy game of touch rugby between several ladies teams. They had a bunch of things for kids (which seem to be the main focus). Supposedly, they were also trying to break the Worlds Record for the largest Rugby scrum.