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Our apartment is located in the Hotel Apartment building "Parthenon" in the center of Toulouse. The building is shared by another hotel, which occupies the first few floors, and Parthenon, which occupies the upper floors of this building. Parthenon offers studios and one-bedroom apartments in various sizes for people who need more comfort than just a hotel room. Our apartment is on the 11th floor with a nice view over Toulouse. |
| The Parthenon is situated on the alley "Allees Juan Jaures", which begins at one end with the train station and ends at Place Wilson, a nice piazza close to the shopping area and offering many restaurants around it. We can't complain at all about our location: no matter where we go, it only takes us a short walk, bicycle ride and even the freeway accesses are closeby to get out of the city quickly. Many times, we see cars parked out on the street (parked in one of the three lanes!) below our apartment while their owners go to town shopping or to dinner and entertainment on the weekends! |
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We are staying in a one bedroom apartment with an entry hall, a small living/dining room and a kitchenette, which is furnished with the most important tools. Our bedroom is nice and large and offers enough storage space to hide all of our belongings! The apartment has recently been renovated and is very modern and fancy. Unfortunataly, the existing decorations in the apartment are rather minimal and the house rules restrict us from hanging anything on the walls or to add other various accessories. We try to do the best in adding some personal belongings in order to feel more like home, but of course it won't replace our real home! |
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| The apartment complex also offers an in-house gym, laundry facilities, a huge lounge with reading material and a TV. Plus, we have access to a storage room for bicycles where we also keep our rollerblades. Only one block away from the Parthenon we found a public sports center which offers a huge olympic size swimming pool. Please note that these pictures have been taken on our first day before we really moved in. Thus, they seem to be very plain! |
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| As I mentioned earlier, we enjoy a nice view from our 11th floor (picture). However, it takes a while to get used to the fact that here, we can literally open the windows and lean outside to look down to the street. It is not like in the States where windows are impossible to be opened! Every time I lean out the window to check on the weather I feel like another Micheal Jackson moment coming up and I almost get dizzy...!! The Amercian lawyers would definitely not approve of this security faux-pas!!! However, the view from the 11th floor has also its advantages: on a nice and clear day, I can peak at the Pyrenees mountains if I really stretch myself and lean far out the window!!! It is definitely worth the sight! |
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Trying to enjoy the nice view at all times, we are usually sleeping without the curtains closed. I seem to have forgotten, that tall buildings like ours will need to have their windows cleaned occasionally: one morning I just had woken up as I suddenly see this dark object covering our bedroom window. Out of reflex, I was hiding under the covers and when I peeked out again I saw that the window washer had stopped right in front of our bedroom window for some cleaning and stared into our home!!! Ten minutes later he was back for the second window in the bedroom and later he surveilled me again while washing the living room windows!!! It was a pretty awkward moment and of course, nobody here informed us of any window washing activities early in the morning! |
Hotel Residence Parthenon
Apartment 1108
86 Allees Jean Jaures
31000 Toulouse FRANCE
011 33 5 61 10 24 58