The Saint-Sernin Balisica in Toulouse

I arrived in Jena on Wednesday night, "worked" on Thursday and Friday (mostly getting keys, getting my laptop on the intranet, signing in, etc.), and then left on Sunday for a meeting in Toulouse. This was for the annual meeting of the project on which I'll be working while I'm here. It was a good way for me to meet some of the people I'll be working with, and figure out who's doing what. Until Friday night I thought that my supervisor would be there as well, but then he couldn't make it, so I was the only representative from my institute. Luckily people didn't ask me too many questions once I explained that I'd been working on this project less than a week. The project (GEMS: Global and regional Earth-system Monitoring using Satellite and in-situ data - a forced acronym if ever there's been one) is funded by the EU, and has 28 agencies taking part from 13 different European countries. It was very different from conferences and meetings I've been before, where there are usually lots of American, a few Canadians, and many visible minorities, usually Asians, working all over the place. From what I could tell, the only non-Europeans working on this project were me and an Australian man working in France (and of course our ancestry is still European - it was a very white meeting, with the only exception being some French scientists of North African descent). There were two other Canadians there, but one was a project reviewer and the other was observing on behalf of Environment Canada. I also had some insight into how funding and project proposals work in Europe, which is also a bit different.

But now on to pictures of the city! The meeting was supposed to start on Monday so I arrived Sunday night, but then the people working on my part mostly couldn't make it until Tuesday, so I had Monday to explore the city a bit. I didn't take too many pictures, mostly because when I took out my camera in public it seemed an open invitation for men to strike up conversations, which was really not what I was looking for, though it was nice to be able to actually understand what people were saying to me after a few days in Jena.

One of the things I did manage to get a few pictures of was the Saint Sernin Basilica. The church was built in honour of Saint Saturnin, the first bishop of Toulouse, who was martyred in the year 250 by being dragged through the streets by a sacrificial bull. One of the nearby streets is called Rue du Taur in memory of this. The church is called Saint Sernin because this is the occitan version of the name Saturnin. In this area in the southwest of France the old language of occitan is still spoken by some grandparents, but more on that later.

A smaller version of the church was built in the 5th century, but it became a really popular spot for pilgrims, and the present structure was built in the 11th century, with construction starting about 1000 years ago. The church really is huge, apparently the largest Romanesque church in the world, and so big that it's hard to get all in one picture. Here's the best I could do:
Most of the exterior of the church is built out of the pink-coloured stone that is seen all over Toulouse, making it "la ville rose". It's hard to tell here, but the dimensions are something like 115 m long and 64 meters wide. And it's quite high as well - here's a picture of the central part of the nave (there are wide hallways along the side as part of the ambulatory so that pilgrims could make their way around without disturbing the mass).
What I found really interesting was some of the older artwork in stone, which looks positively ancient. This carving claims to be "Christ in Majesty", though it's not often that you see depictions of Jesus with a little Buddha belly anymore.
There is also a crypt beneath the church, chock-full of relics. Most of these relics are housed in ornate metal boxes, many of which are built to look like little churches. Here's one of them, though not one of the more church-looking ones.

There was also a sarchophagus on display, which was built in the fourth or fifth century. It used to be by one of the entrances, and when it was examined it was found to contain the remains of several people who lived around the 10th to 12th centuries, thought to have been the counts of Toulouse from that period. Also, the lid and the base don't quite fit together and are made of slightly different stone, so they're thought to have come from different sarcophagi. On the side are carvings of little dolphins, meant to represent the passage of the soul to the other side.