i am writing my thesis this semester, which means i am going through old notebooks to extract any sort of ingenious thought process in search of inspiration. i found this, an account of last year's spring break with kimmie norton. without further ado, nine months too late, i present to you: marseilles!!
whenever i am walking to the train station in the dark of the early morning, carrying a week's worth of living essentials crammed hastily in my backpack because i always seem to pack in the wee hours of the morning, get three hours of sleep, and proceed to travel in the morning, i always feel somewhat like a secret agent, on my way to a swanky european mission. unfortunately, secret agents usually don't wear birkenstocks, carry baguettes in a northface backpack, or have shaky hands, highly caffeinated after an accidental double espresso, made in the dark, trying not to wake up the rest of the apartment with my ineptitude and whispered swearing.
this time, my travels take me to spring break in the south of france, marseilles to be exact. after ruling out nice and monaco because 1. i am a college student backpacking in europe and not made of money that nice and monaco require and 2. i am, unfortunately, not grace kelly, nor will i miraculously become her once the train pulls into the station on the riviera, marseilles became the destination of choice after a very professional, travel agency-endorsed google image search revealing beautiful beaches and turquoise waters, quite the opposite of the stormy atlantic of the new hampshire seacoast.
after heated, one-sided arguments with the turnstiles in the paris metro, i am anxiously awaiting the arrival of my best childhood friend kimmie at the airport. this is her first time in france, and i have agreed to meet her at the airport rather than leave her stranded to navigate the labyrinth that is paris with no knowledge of french, a fate worse than consecutive root canals with fading novocaine. i feel very much like a limo driver waiting for a client, bored, holding a sign with a name scrawled on it. i hang over the gate, drumming my fingernails against the bar and try to make small talk with the limo driver beside me. "doesn't it feel like you're waiting here forever?" i ask him, my casual laugh turning into a maniacal giggle given my lack of sleep and extra espresso drank on the train. he stares at me, decides pleasant, meaningless conversation is below his pay grade, and looks away. oh, well. i turn my attention to picking kimmie out of the crowd, made infinitely more difficult by the flight arriving from china, where everyone jabbering away in mandarin and wearing rice hats. not exactly the custom in kimmie's ireland. finally, a familiar blonde speck of home appears amidst a sea of black suitcases and weary travelers... kimmie has arrived! i tackle her like a linebacker, and we escape the airport, ready for adventure.
an uneventful train ride is a misleading total opposite for what awaits us in marseilles, where we arrive at dusk, and rush to find the hostel before dark. after some vague directions and a stop at a boulangerie down a small, graffitied road, we find the hostel, where we are required to leave our shoes in cubbies much like i did in kindergarden. (hopefully, unlike kindergraden, this trip will not include a dramatic reenactment of the very hungry caterpillar, my crowning achievement at the age of five. i was a strawberry.) on our quest for dinner, we encounter an african restaurant, a cheap pizza place, a strange french roundabout, and, most interestingly, a prostitute. classy! we will later discover that marseilles has some seedier neighborhoods, and ours is one of them, judging by our 8pm self-imposed curfew and the guy shooting up on a doorstep on our walk back from the beach. despite this, we DO manage to find the only locals-only, non-tourist beach in the city, which is fitting, because the two of us could not look more like tourists. (well, unless we wore plaid shorts, baseball hats, and sneakers, pointing obliviously and shouting loudly in english.) instead, we are blonde blonde blonde in a southern european city filled with brunettes, sunburned and peeling where everyone else is effortlessly tanned, and, yes, speaking loudly in english, a fact that becomes very evident when we share a bus with a middle school soccer team, and we are the lobster look-alikes silent amongst constant chatter in french. two of these things are not like the others...
what is also very non-european is our two-mile daily hikes along the coast, mostly uphill, carrying beach bags and the ever-present optimism that the picture-perfect postcard beach is just around the bend. while we never quite find it, we do find a quirky, colorful harbor with beach cottages and sailboats and a restaurant with mussels. we eat lots of mussels that week, a familiar and tasty throwback to our seacoast lives in hampton. our last meal in marseilles is actually in the train station, because there is NO WAY we are missing the train back to paris, and arrive with plenty of time to spare. the prospect of mcdonalds in the train station is gloriously american, and we set off for the train station, only to find that every train is delayed until further notice. typical marseilles. no matter. we go shoe shopping and people-watching and, with the prospect of ever leaving marseilles becoming bleaker and bleaker, cancel our hotel in paris. a man does laps around the train station, steadily and impressively eating his way through an entire box of ice cream sandwiches.
we order mcdonalds instead. kimmie tries to explain her custom order of cheeseburgers minus the burger to the poor girl working behind the counter, who looks at us, nonplussed, and tells us that there is no button on the computer for a meat-less cheeseburger, but is a champ and brings us one anyway. the train finally arrives, and we run to find our car. i am crazily checking tickets and yelling at conductors, while i very clearly hear kimmie behind me: "DON'T YOU DARE SQUISH OUR MCDONALDS!" we find our seats, breathless and starving and definitely delirious, and the couple sitting across from us is half irish, half french, the perfect counterpart to our study abroad hometown. we spend the entire trip chatting with them, and they save our lives when we arrive in paris well after midnight, needing to catch the last metro to the airport. naturally, we miss it, and the woman and i panic at each other in rapid-fire french, while her fiancé and kimmie have absolutely no idea what's going on. possible scenarios are running through my mind like a movie on fast-forward: will we make it to the airport? do we have to sleep in the metro? do we have to take on paris in the middle of the night, wandering the streets in an unfamiliar neighborhood? oh mon dieu. fortunately, the french woman is more level-headed than we are, and infinitely more familiar with paris, and gives us instructions to catch the questionable night bus to the airport. i argue with the bus driver so we don't have to buy a second ticket to get to the airport (when in reality, i would have paid a million dollars, given him all of my personal belongings both in france and in the states, and promised my first-born to get us there in one piece).
airports at two-thirty in the morning are interesting places. nothing is open, which makes the cookies we bought in marseilles a precious commodity. we find an international terminal scattered with travelers balanced precariously on their luggage, trying to catch twenty minutes of shut-eye while wedged uncomfortably between the armrests. kimmie and i are well past the delirious stage at this point, and she curls up on the floor to fall asleep. i tell her to dump out her clothes and make a mattress of her dirty laundry, but she refuses, for: "it costs five euro to do laundry, but it's free to wash me!"
the wee hours of the morning pass slower than a herd of turtles in peanut butter, and our situation becomes more and more ridiculous as kimmie's flight back to ireland moves further up the list of departures. sleep-deprived and very prone to laugh attacks, the neverending last day of our spring break is a fitting conclusion to our week. while not quite our imagined dream of turquoise oceans and resort beaches, marseilles is gloriously unexpected, always interesting, and hilariously unforgettable.
view from the harbor
