I don’t really have any memories of why exactly did I decide to stop and live in Toulouse. I’ve been telling everyone that I really loved the people that I met here, and that I liked the weather, and that I wanted to learn French, and that I like cheese and wine. And then I've been adding a month to my answer to "how long have you been in France?" every so often, as the time went by. You know the usual “talking with your driver to make conversation talk” when hitchhiking or “talking back to the guy who’s trying to chat you up” on a social gathering. I’ve talked about cheese and wine and wanting to learn French and about how long have I lived in Toulouse so often that I don’t remember what the initial reason for stopping here was. I doubt there was one.
I live in a
house which is just big enough for the amount of hippies that live in it. Everyone here is excited about collecting as many inhabitants into our small community as possible, we have stopped at eight at the moment (it’s a four-small-bedroom family house) but there’s definitely more room in the living room and in the garage and in the attic! Yes we’ve discussed building some more little rooms in the attic so more hippies could move in! Actually quite often some nice hippie friends of our hippie roommates sleep on a mattress in the garage our outside in the hammock. The more the merrier. At least they bring cheese and wine. Did I mention there are a lot of hippies living in this house?
The brightest side of communal living is definitely the ability to share everything – food, time, skills, a sewing machine, stories, bills, languages (English, French, Swedish, Estonian in the house)... The worst is the inevitable lack of your own space – at any point there’s always at least four people in the living room smoking spliffs and playing board games, and sometimes there’s a party in the house/garden that you don’t really want to attend but you cannot escape the noise either.
During the whole six months I’ve been around all this hippieness, I’ve picked up French in an intermediate level, have learned to love cheese and wine and colours and scarves and collecting furniture from the streets, curiously have not picked up smoking weed yet, have lived in a tent, have built a big teepee in the garden for two of us to live in and have figured out the best dumpster-diving places in the area. As for dumpster-diving, the word to describe it is really so much uglier that the activity itself – all you really have to do is take your bike to the nearest little grocery shop around midnight and pick up nice packaged things from between all the cardboard in the bin behind the shop. They throw away almost everything and always in large quantities – yoghurts, meat, cheese, sausages, vegetables, more yoghurts, more meat (honestly our poor little freezer cannot accommodate more meat) more cheese, salad items, pâté, pancakes, eggs, mushrooms, apples, tons of bananas, sweets, bread... I must say it's rather nice to not pay for food, but it also comes with a being poor mindset, and with a different idea of a minimum amount of money you have to have on your bank account to survive. I am starting to doubt the benefits of getting all your food for free.
I’ve started to hitchhike with weird items like a big stuffed teddy-tiger and a weird hairy French hippie-guy and a bike (not everything at once, although I did try to hitchhike with two whole hairy french guys once but left them after an unsuccessful half an hour), I’ve took off in two day’s notice to Istanbul and in five-minute notice to Brittany. I’ve sat in Toulouse’s numerous parks with beers and juggling balls and guitars and cheese and wine and biked up and down it’s only hill for seven hundred times. I’ve considered getting dreadlocks and cutting my hair short and making cute little items to sell on the local Sunday markets.
I took my beautiful orange bike to a little park near the ring road of Toulouse one evening. It was a beautiful autumn evening with nearly twenty degrees of warmth so characteristic to any location in Southern France. And there we were, bike and I, on those two square metres of land in a random location in a random city in a random country, and I was counting the endless stream of cars hurrying up and down the ring road - first in whatever language I found easier to think in (can't quite remember if it was English or Estonian), then in French. And I realised that if I went and stood by this road and maybe smiled and raised my thumb then someone would stop for me and take me to... well wherever I'd like to go at that point. Or if I didn't want to go anywhere then I could just stand there and say random apologies to people who stop until I found a Very Handsome And Interesting Guy and then I wouldn't care about where we're going. Or I could stop random people who were jogging or walking their dogs or cycling by and ask them for... some company, or a cigarette, or if they had a kitten to give away or if they could teach me a little bit of French... I was this little insignificant person in a place where another little people where whizzing past in a speed of a hundred cars, joggers, bikers per second and I was this little wannabe do-not-smoke-weed "have done the same thing for every day for two months" hippie, but I felt like I could stop the world and pick anything and anyone I want to see in my universe. There's no apologies for staying in a rut. I really feel I need to to something else, find the next circumstances, the next people, the next location..
So when the next person asks me why I am staying in Toulouse, I am most likely going to tell them that I am not. I’ve done all the hippie things and everything above-mentioned is just an activity now, not a challenge. I might turn back to getting a job, paying for my food, speaking the language I understand, getting a flat for two and choosing things for it in a shop. You know the normal person’s life. I might go and live with my best friend in Estonia and get a random job in the old town of Tallinn. I might move back to the UK and start a teepee-building business. I might be just telling all that because I have my birthday coming up and I feel I’m getting old and haven’t achieved any of the “real stuff” yet. Real stuff like an office job and a steady partner and kids and a cat and.... the life I escaped a few years ago.
But I guess now I have the knowledge that if I only want to, then I can just get up and go somewhere else and do whatever. And I probably will.
