This is Saint Sernin's Basilica. It is a very famous pilgrimage church. It was the second most popular pilgrimage church in the middle ages after St. Peter in Rome. Millions of people flocked to this Romanesque cathedral to see important relics.
My favorite church of the day, however, was Jacobin's Church. It was the mother church of the Dominican Order and also the inquisition. The remains of St. Thomas Aquinas are held here.
Built in the Gothic style, it has an impressive ceiling design and beautiful stained glass windows.
The reflections from the stained glass were magnificent.
I couldn't get enough of it. I thought it was just a gorgeous sight.
After that, Eric took us to see the Garonne River on the way to the University of Toulouse for lunch. Eric told us that Toulouse is always compared with Florence because brick is the material of choice in both places and Italy is well-known for the domes, like the one pictured above, that dominate their city skylines.
Lunch was an interesting experience. It was chaos--lots of people, lots of trays (piled high with food), lots of lines, and barely enough space to move around. A few of us managed to find a table to eat at and I marveled at the size of the school and the student body. SFU is tiny in comparison! Once we finished eating, we had to wait for the bus to come pick us up so we could go tour Airbus. The sun was out and it was a really nice afternoon.
I thought visiting Airbus was so interesting and I wished we could have stayed longer. We weren't allowed to take any pictures inside the site, but it was a massive facility. We were in the second-largest building in the world and the largest building in Europe. There were three Airbus A380s side-by-side. These are currently the largest passenger airplanes in the world, and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future. The A380 is a double-deck place, so it can hold over 800 passengers at maximum capacity. We viewed these humongous planes from a wall of windows above the the workspace, but most of us wished we would have been granted access to go down to the ground floor and see the planes up close. All in all, it was a very cool experience.
Next, it was onto the Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation with students from Dickinson College. The musuem exhibits contained artifacts and relics of WWII. We learned about the French Resistance and the deportation that occurred in that time period. After that, we had the rest of the night to ourselves. Cat, Chelsea, Eric, Matt, and I ate a delicious dinner at an Italian restaurant.
We were worried about having too much time to kill before catching the bus back to Albi, but thankfully we wasted almost an entire half hour figuring out how to handle the check and counting money. haha.
It was a long day and we didn't get back to the monastery until around 1am. We took a bus to Albi, then Tim, Gerry, and Dan drove us back to Ambialet. Suffice to say, I slept very well last night once I finally settled into bed. But I enjoyed the time we spent in Toulouse, hopefully we get to go back and explore the city more later on.
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