Marseille'n away

OK, so the caveat here is that I only spent one day scrambling around a corner of Marseille, but I: loved it pretty overwhelmingly? And so we're doing a whole separate post about it, and a separate video, and we will NOT apologize for loving port cities more than most things that are available for us to love!! After the jump: The South Of France, But Not In A Beachy Way!

I've always had Marseille as one of those port-city destinations I wanted to visit. Like Genoa and a few others, the combination of waterfront and working-class doing-things city life is specifically appealing to me in a way that beachy getaways are usually not, and on this trip I'd had the notion to swing down for a day once I realized there was a low-cost train service that would make it basically a $20 round-trip fare.

On the other hand, you're telling me THIS is the train station I have to walk out of? Gross! Who needs it!

Initially, the aim had been to join a Culinary Backstreets tour; I have become less of a "travel is for FOOD" person in the past decade or so, and food tours can be hit-or-miss at best, with a lot focusing on checklist tourism and gluttony. CB has been different, in my experience, with their Lisbon tour in particular turning out to be one of the better cultural-history tours I have had anywhere under any circumstances. I forget if I discussed that on the Lisbon post (and checking that would require SO MANY CLICKS), but my guide started our day by drawing a map of the globe in crayon on the paper tablecloth of our first-stop bakery, then pulled a jar of spices out of his bag and began explaining how Portugese colonization changed food culture across the globe and home in Portugal alike. It became a full day of discussing structures of power and colonialism, globalization, and the ways that food can tell a story of people groups and of place as loci of constant change, rather than "here are ten classic dishes, scrom nom nom." Their Marseille tour looked very much along these lines, essentially billing itself as "whatever about bouillabaisse, this is an international and intercontinental city and it is full of North Africans and Europeans from all over and we need to grapple with everyone that has built and continues to build Marseille." RAD.

Street art: also rad???

Ultimately, CB didn't get enough registrants to run the tour I'd been hoping to catch, but I still wanted to see the city, dangit, and so I went ahead and booked my trains and zipped down at the crack of dawn, returning right around sunset, and was delighted to find, the moment I stepped out of the train station, that Marseille Is For Me.

There are some cities that you vibe with instantly - for me, it's an energy with how people carry themselves, a city where things are happening and people are trying new things all the time. You feel it most obviously in places like New York or Berlin, but Marseille also had the variation on that which you do find in those cities (and I'd say Chicago as well) of having corners that feel hyper-local - Carroll Gardens instead of Midtown - where people are just living their lives with a sense of ease. It's right on the water, obviously, which always makes me feel a kinda ease and joy, and it is compact enough (for the most part) to feel extremely walkable to a walking maniac like m'self.

In this photo, a baby statue reminds us all to KEEP OUR MOUTHS SHUT about cool cities that we like in part because they don't seem to be catering to tourism so much as doing their own thing. Rude, baby!

It is also - and again, this is where cities like Berlin are good comparison points - fantastically multicultural in the most glorious way, with numerous languages and modes of national dress on display in the more congregated corners of the city, and a food scene (not that I dug too deep in just one day) to match that layering of cultures. It was a magnificent accretion. I coulda spent weeks there.

There's not much to report on as my day was mostly that: walking everywhere, stopping off for a beer and a picnic lunch on some broad steps near the port, poking up to the cathedral that overlooks the city, and (more to my taste) following a random "ceramics" google maps search into an artists' warren of streets in a hilltop neighborhood jampacked with street art, local printmakers, ceramicists, and visual artists of all stars and stripes, winding up the day (after a really doofy "oh no why'd I book the wrong return train" mixup indicating that this academic year really has done a number on my brain) in a gorgeously sprawling park before returning to the train.

Parks: Do We Like Them? Opinions Differ, Among Lunatics

 

Almost within ten minutes of walking into town, I had the thought, "If I was doing this trip again, I'd have based out of Marseille," and I still think that's true.  (It has joined my "let's make this a monthlong base" city list alongside the everpresent Berlin and a few Italian cities, should my good fortune to teach and summer abroad continue.) It makes it all the more likely that my summer wanders will include a stopoff at Genoa, and I would say the odds that I return are extremely high.

I think that catches us up on my journeys, though I'll possibly have a li'l baby post up before my departure to wrap up my miniature road trip and Chicago return of which I'm still in the midst. Til then, I've got a nice pile of (mercifully forward-facing) academic doodads to knock out and work through before a glorious, infinitely sleepy if only temporary unplug! Let us all REST!

SORRY if you put a weird opening and a set of bars in front of a lil mirror on a door in some random alleyway in Marseille, I WILL take a photo of myself in it, that is The Pat King Promise.