{"id":15885,"date":"2015-09-23T09:30:54","date_gmt":"2015-09-23T16:30:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.msia.org\/newdayherald\/?p=15885"},"modified":"2015-09-23T09:30:54","modified_gmt":"2015-09-23T16:30:54","slug":"15885","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.msia.org\/newdayherald\/archives\/15885-15885","title":{"rendered":"J-R Legacy Tour Day 7 &#8211; Toulouse Tour and Medieval Madness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.msia.org\/newdayherald\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/66-640.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-15886\" src=\"https:\/\/www.msia.org\/newdayherald\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/66-640.jpg\" alt=\"66-640\" width=\"640\" height=\"427\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Our first day in Toulouse, fourth largest city in France. Toulouse native Claudie calls in the light and we start a walking tour. We&#8217;re in a southern city now, and it&#8217;s a different world\u2014you can feel the influence of Spain, Morocco, and Africa. It&#8217;s a melange of cultures and races, juicier and more Mediterranean. People look more alive to me than in Paris.<\/p>\n<div style=\"max-width: 640px; height: 400px\" class=\"fshow-wrapper\">\n<iframe src=\"https:\/\/www.msia.org\/newdayherald\/fshow_orbit_568f69558d682?photosetid=72157659007322901&user_id=71628367%40N07&gallery_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.flickr.com%2Fphotos%2F71628367%40N07%2Fsets%2F72157659007322901%2F\" style=\"width: 100%; height: 400px\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" webkitallowfullscreen=\"true\" mozallowfullscreen=\"true\" border=\"0\">\n<\/iframe>\n<noscript>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/flic.kr\/s\/aHskkYbzda\" target=\"_blank\">Click to View<\/a><\/noscript>\n<\/div>\n\n<p>We visit beautiful old churches, one of which has a &#8220;black Madonna.&#8221; And the walking tour ends with a visit to &#8220;La Fleur\u00e9e de Pastel&#8221; where the owner gives us a demonstration of their ancient technique of using a plant to make dyes of a light blue color that that isn&#8217;t reproducible\u00a0using modern chemical dyes. The color is exquisite and it&#8217;s a fascinating process that involves extracting and concentrating the dye from the plant, placing the fabric in the dye, and then letting it oxidize by contacting the air, so you can actually watch the fabric get bluer after it&#8217;s taken out of the dye solution.<\/p>\n<p>In the afternoon we take a tour of a Medieval castle in Penne, that&#8217;s in the process of being restored. The owner, Axel, an architect, felt connected to it and wanted to buy it ever since he saw it as a child. He made his first offer on it when he was 14, and finally bought it when he grew up. He says he has felt a presence there with him since he first set foot on the property. He&#8217;s put his own money into making it an educational historical attraction, and has people dressed as workers, stonemasons, soldiers and cooks to demonstrate how people lived at the time. We have a lot of fun learning to fight, eat, and work with stone, medieval-style, and Axel, along with guide Lise, are superb hosts who go out of their way to make us feel at home, and give us all the details about what it would have been like to live there.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.msia.org\/newdayherald\/categories\/j-r-legacy-tour\">Click here to read all of the posts from the J-R Legacy Tour.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our first day in Toulouse, fourth largest city in France. Toulouse native Claudie calls in the light and we start a walking tour. We&#8217;re in a southern city now, and it&#8217;s a different world\u2014you can feel the influence of Spain, Morocco, and Africa. It&#8217;s a melange of cultures and races, juicier and more Mediterranean. People [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":87765,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[257],"tags":[90,259],"class_list":["post-15885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ndh-archives","tag-john-morton","tag-spiritual-light"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.msia.org\/newdayherald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.msia.org\/newdayherald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.msia.org\/newdayherald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.msia.org\/newdayherald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.msia.org\/newdayherald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.msia.org\/newdayherald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15885\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.msia.org\/newdayherald\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.msia.org\/newdayherald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.msia.org\/newdayherald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.msia.org\/newdayherald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}