Nothing Toulouse: Part 3

Studying abroad is a stressful proposition. Gemma had literally eleven thousand forms to fill in using the infamous red ink and blood combo so beloved by the French. Me, I’m a freelance writer so perhaps you’ve already guessed, this means we have little to no money.

With the apartment chewing up an extraordinary slice of our meagre cheese wheel, and the exchange rate floating at a ratio not seen since the Vichy regime, our funds were and are running at the lowest of ebbs. In a country where a Big Mac meal costs £6 and a pint costs £6, this means taking a hit on the quality. And lets face it: when you can’t afford a McDonalds, the Earl of Sandwich’s classic idea to put a ‘piece of meat between two slices of bread’ sounds like something Heston Blumenthal would serve on his taster menu.

The economical spread is totally nonsensical. A bar pint costs £6, while 24 half pints of cheap import lager from the local supermarket costs £5. To consume the equivalent amount of beer in the cheapest bar would cost an astronomical £72. You may have noticed I’ve done the maths on this one, and with good reason. It’s time to introduce you to Finkbräu.

I now measure my consumption of food and drink in Toulouse via the medium of Finkbräu. For less
than €5, I can purchase nearly 12 pints of glorious import beer which tastes not unlike Budweiser. Undoubtedly I’ve lost any potential future brand promotion deals with the latter company. I don’t care. Finkbräu is a glorious beverage, the kind of stuff that nations are built on.

Plus, I can get royally pissed for less than a double cheeseburger and chips. The oddities don’t stop there: photocopies costs €0.02 per copy, almost 1/5th of the UK price, yet a pack of chewing gum can go for as much as €2. These bargains are flashes in the pan in what amounts to a complete crumbling of any imperial macho that the British once possessed, a justified and deserved state of affairs in an ideal world, a bloody expensive one in the world of a freelance writer and a student with pocket-raping rent. Once we swarmed the globe with beer bellies and the indomitable pound coin, basking in the heady glow of an impossibly unfair exchange rate. Now, with the ratios restored, we are reduced to peasantry, a brutal comedown from the halcyon days where a foreign pint cost about as much as a glass of tap water.

There is one shining light on the bleak horizon. The Boulangerie. A French bakery of any size, description or surrounding is an almost intolerably wonderful thing. Ranks, files, rows and columns of culinary excellence at a ridiculously low price. It is bread and pastry, costing next to nothing to make, so why is it that gorging on a Pain au Chocolat is an almost spiritual experience? I simply can’t get enough of the Boulangerie nearest us, run by the friendliest lady I’ve ever met. Greeting me in the morning with the kind of face not encountered outside of Postman Pat, she tolerates my unconscionably awful French and never fails to leave me with a smile on my face.

There are good people in the world. However, my personal theory is that if there is a higher power, it has blessed all with the same amount of talents and flaws, the only difference being the balance in each of us. I like to think myself a decent writer while at the same time knowing the art of scoring a free kick outside the area will always be beyond me. With this delightful madame, her bane is the almost schizophrenic manner in which she mans her post. On one notable occasion, I asked for two Pain au Chocolats only to be confronted by the kind of panic a whirling dervish would consider a little over the top as she typed the wrong amount into the till.

As the register opened with a ding, a great big shitstorm loomed on the horizon and paper bags and wrappings flew across the shop as she searched in desperation for a calculator. She recovered her composure in time to bid me a good day, but I knew that some part of her had died forever in that moment, and that that kind of moment probably happened to her three or four times a day.

As a result of our fiscal constraints, I find myself in a state of permanent semi-hunger. Not that I’m complaining. The food I have eaten is generally fresh and excellent, and I’m in a privileged position. It’s just that, sometimes, I want an individual size packet of salt-and-shake crisps, or a Nandos , or pork scratchings, or a full English, or chutney, or something, anything with HP sauce splashed all over it. Still, embracing new cultures is what travelling is all about.