Marseilles

Marseilles

I am sitting in what is unironically named the Explorer's Lounge, the place that is highest up and farthest forward of all the accessible places in the ship.  I have a cup of peppermint tea, but no muffin, because there aren't any at the buffet yet.  Very smooth, mellow sitar music, but I've brought my headphones and will listen to community radio instead.  I can't see anything out the wall of windows, tilted way back to cut air resistance, I guess, and to give the ship its sleek profile.  It won't be dawn for a while.  There's a two-foot-long telescope on a tripod next to me, and a book-lined wall behind me.  I have the spacious room to myself.

I've seen three other guys up and around in the ship, in my long walk aft for tea and then forward again; that's always been my experience on cruise ships – a few guys up early, solitary, never once a woman.  

You can feel the ship moving, all the time.  This is a surprise.  Just a little tremor – back and forth, up and down.  Not enough to disturb the surface of a cup of tea, except that it “sloshes” back and forth to an extent that is only just noticeable.  This is a much smaller ship than we've been on before, and so it's apparently not the complete master of the water it's in.  It should be interesting in a storm.

We are turning; there are lights on shore, and that's how I can tell.  It doesn't look like we're heading for a brightly lit city, but what do I know.  I am looking out the windows in about the direction that the sun should rise, but no sign of dawn.  I'm not sure why, but my computer has lost an hour – in fact, I noticed that last night – for some unknown reason.  It is not accurate; I just asked a staff member for the time and she gave me a time that aligned with the time we've been keeping since Barcelona.  Time zones?  Not clear; I looked them up but couldn't get a map that I could magnify enough to see if we've crossed the next time zone line.  And my phone is on airplane mode, so it still gives me Eastern Standard Time, which requires that I do math when I wake up and want to know what time it is.

The ship is slowing – I can no longer feel it moving.  Still nothing but scattered lights on shore.  Then a little later, the dawn is beginning, and I can see that we are entering – no, we're surrounded by – the extensive harbor.  Lights on shore still do not seem to indicate a big city.  Again – what do I know?  Ooh – and there is the iconic Notre Dame de la Garde, Marseilles' symbol and most visited site, perched on the highest point in the city, with the dawn coalescing behind it.  Very cool.  The sun will rise right behind it.

Now we've maneuvered so that we're facing out to sea, and backing

Ile d'If

into Marseilles.  And there ahead of us is the Ile d'If, on which is the Chateau d'If, a notorious prison made famous by Alexandre Dumas in The Count of Monte Cristo which, if you are really into revenge fantasies and have a lot of time, is the book for you.

Marseilles is really a pleasant city to be parked in; only two junior skyscrapers, and the rest low buildings, some new, some old, whole swaths of houses with reddish roofs.  The city sits on slightly rolling hills with a ring of higher ridges behind; these look pretty arid, with patchy vegetation and trees.  The city rises gently and unevenly with distance from the water, until it runs into the surrounding hills, where it stops.  The surrounding hills rise to a point to the west of the city, and that's where they built Notre Dame de la Garde; not a huge church, and not the Cathedral here, but you can see it from almost anywhere in town or in the harbor.  By the way, the 'Cathedral here' is down by the harbor, right in front of us - Cathédrale Sainte-Marie-Majeure de Marseille, otherwise known as La Major.  Very different looking – Byzantine and Roman Revival – how does that work?  It was built in the mid-19th century, replacing the tenth century church on that spot, some of which still stands.

We ate breakfast and made our way out to the bus for our included shore excursion, which, it turns out, was a bus tour of Marseilles and free time, followed by a bus ride back to the ship.  I had some trouble making sense of the guide's voice over the audio system, and missed a lot, and, as you can imagine, we could see what he was pointing out only if it was on our side and in our viewing radius. [Abbey: e.g., There was a sheltered inlet that became a sailing school after the Olympics. I tried to get a picture for of the sailboats for David, no luck.]  We basically followed the waterfront for quite a way; this is a city that seems oriented toward the sea.*  Huge marinas with hundreds and hundreds of boats of all sizes; lots of water sports along the way – crew, kayak slalom courses, paddle boards, sail races, etc.  We saw a pod of long-distance swimmers making their way along the shore, each trailing a brightly-colored buoy.  There's a sheltered surf wave place, and something neither of us understood – something under the water near the shore that would amplify waves in this protected harbor, so you can do outdoor surfing. [The guide gave a Gallic shrug and said it just made you go up and down.] The guide said that the part of the harbor where the river emptied (the Huveaune River – this will be on the next spelling test, so pay attention) was essentially a sewer when he was a boy, but was fresh and clear now.  Many Marseillaises enjoying the water in many ways seem to agree.

We stopped at a war memorial that was large and somber, and looked out, ominously, at the Ile d'If.

At one point, the guide pointed out into the harbor and said something about establishing sea level precisely by taking readings three times a day for eleven years (!), but I didn't get all of it, so I looked it up, and sure enough -

In 1884, the Marseilles sea level observatory was established to create a scientific basis for France's national height system, with its initial continuous measurements starting in February 1885 and concluding in December 1896. This 11-year period of data was used to define the  French National Geodetic Leveling Datum, a new reference point that replaced an earlier marker.

Follow the link for lots of nerdy stuff about establishing sea level – something that's probably pretty important in the city by the sea.  Turns out that the other sea-level measuring station is in Ajaccio, Corsica, where we're going tomorrow.

We also saw the only two tiny beaches in Marseilles; in 2000, the high-speed rail reached Marseilles and tourism took off, but not, says our guide, because of the beaches.  They were really tiny, and neither looked inviting.  Marseilles' harbor is a rock-bound coast.

We returned to the city center, which was a couple of blocks from the harbor, got off the bus and started our free time.  The Christmas Market was right there, so we had a look.  Again, a lot of gee-gaws and trinkets, jewelry, toys and Christmas decorations, but also really interesting food (we were still full from breakfast), very nice clothing and scarves, and cool wooden cut-out toys – actually, too complex and elegant for toys – cars, clocks, ships, a big safe, and a variety of maps.  They also had a variety of wooden jigsaw puzzles.  I thought it was pretty cool.

Right next to the Market was a big, ornate carousel with a wide variety of animals and vehicles to rideon.  We went around to the other side, where the sun was shining on it, to take pictures.  Abbey chased a little kid around who was chasing pigeons, trying to get a picture.  Abbey was trying to get a picture, not the kid.

It's Saturday, sunny and relatively warm, and everyone was out with their  families and friends, downtown, to enjoy it.  It was a festive atmosphere, not at all what one would expect when encountering large crowds in a city.  It was nice to be there amongst all that.

In the plaza where the carousel was, a little boy was doing his best to catch a pigeon.  He ran back and forth, scattering the birds with every pass, and it didn't seem like he was discouraged about not catching any.  Abbey took many pictures of him so as to be able to draw the scene later.

Since we're not really shoppers, there wasn't much else to do, so we decided to walk back to the ship – 'a fifteen minute walk,' says our guide.  It was twice that, at least but it was mostly along the waterfront – an extensive marina that went on for a half mile – Old Port of Marseilles – on our left side, and one cafe or restaurant after another on the right, each with ten or twenty tables for outside seating.  Every place that was open was packed; people of all ages walking along with us.  And yet when Abbey had to get a stone out of her shoe, there was a bench, facing the sun, empty and ready for us.  She got her shoe working right, but then we sat back for a while and enjoyed the sun sparking off the water and the boats' brightworks, and, of course, the view of Notre Dame de la Garde right in front of us, up the hill.  This is what I'll probably remember of Marseilles.

We had lunch when we got back to the ship, we didn't eat a lot, but we sat outside in the stern, which was facing the Cathedral and the city, and enjoyed the view and the warm sun.  I even had a Guinness.  It was a very long lunch because – why leave?  The Cathedral was right there, the city was spread out in front of us, the line of hills surrounded us, and there was Notre Dame again, up on its hill.  

We finally disengaged from lunch (after some ice cream and sorbet), and went back to the room and sat on the balcony.  I worked on the journal and Abbey read.  Then I went to watch an hour-long movie about the Spanish Armada which, other than being a little dramatic and hyperbolic, was a really interesting story about how marine archaeology helped us figure out what was happening in 1588, and how it changed the world.  Computer graphics were used in an interesting way:  at wreck sites where precise measurements were made of everything that was found, computers reconstructed the find and we 'saw' the water drain away and leave the wreck exposed.  Then we could go closer to see the important finds, from massive struts that had held the ship together to fragile astrolabes to bronze cannon and cannonballs.  It sounds a little corny, but it was fun.

I forgot to mention – before we began our walk back to the ship, we stopped at a bank right by the Christmas Market to get some euros.  We've been cashless (or, more accurately, euro-less) the whole trip so far, and we thought we should be prepared.  We tried three machines:  the first wouldn't accept our card, the second didn't work, and the third asked for a PIN for our credit card.  In Europe, as we noted last time, all credit cards have PINs.  Ours, of course, doesn't.  But I did have the debit card we have never used but is what gets us into our credit union's lobby when the bank is closed.  So I tried that, and the machine advised me to contact my bank because something wasn't right.  Since turning on the phone would immediately cost $12, we left, euro-less.  Sometimes it feels like the world of technology works only for other people and not us.

Then we lazed away the afternoon – Abbey took a much-needed nap [Abbey: Our upgraded room not only came with more square footage, but also a ventilation system that whines at intermittent high speeds. Lucky Gary sleeps right through it.] and I worked on what has become “The Picasso Project,” then dinner.  Dinner was much better tonight.  Can you imagine raving about parsnip and pear soup?  A treat for the taste buds.  They serve soup here in an interesting way:  you are presented with a (high style) soup bowl, but all it has in it is a bunch of dry ingredients, and maybe a little splash of thick sauce in the bottom, and then they pour the hot broth into it.  So instead of sitting in a soup pot in the kitchen for an hour or so, the dry ingredients are fresh and crisp.  For instance, tonight's soup had sesame seeds in it, and they were really sharp and flavorful.

And another lap around the ship after dinner, and I returned to work on the journal (and waited for a major update for my word processor to download through our middling-speed wi-fi) while Abbey finished out her mile.  Now it's time to watch the port talk and learn about tomorrow's stop, in Corsica, at a city I've never heard of.  See you tomorrow!

* - Later in the trip (Casablanca) we found out that this kind of major scenic road running along the shore is called a cornice (cor-NEE-sh).  This particular road was named after US President John F. Kennedy.