Marseille & a Kindly Old Man

Oops I haven't written in an even longer time than usual… which you should take to mean that I am having way too much fun here to have time to write blog posts.  Now will commence the backdating.

Marseille
The second weekend in November I spent enjoying the beauty of the south of France!  I flew to Marseille with my friends Nora and Stacey, two girls that don't go to NU (yay making new friends!) Marseille was a seemingly random choice for a weekend trip, but it ended up being absolutely perfect.  It was wonderful to go to a place where the entire weekend wasn't jam-packed with site-seeing.  However, I did realize that French is one of those languages that you can't just pick up easily.  I spent the whole weekend hand signaling waiters and grossly mispronouncing street names.

told you it happened

When we checked into our hostel we were alone in our 6-person mixed room (score! we thought) but when we came back from wandering we discovered a new addition to our room: Jack the twenty-something struggling British musician.  We bridged the awkward few minutes of cohabitation by making some forced small talk and then realized that he was a pretty chill guy.  Just doing that solo hosteling thing.  We decided to join the 5€ organic pesto pasta hostel dinner cooked by hippie chef Dan.  It turned out to be a delicious choice, with the added bonus of some cheese melted onto the pasta with a blowtorch.

We spent one fabulous day exploring the Calanques National Park about a 40 minute bus ride outside the city.  Americans (or at least me) have a bad habit of condensing France to Paris, when in reality there is so much of the country left to explore!   Spending the day in the Calanques was like a deep breath of fresh air in the midst of 50 jumping jacks.  That was a weird simile.  What I mean to say is that I have been going non-stop for a while with school, host family, volunteering, Sevilla exploring  and new cities and meandering along a road on the coast of France was exactly what I needed.  The pace was casual, the company was grand, and the language barrier meant that we didn't really know what was going on or where we were going… in a good way.  Our day was refreshing, relaxing and reinvigorating all in one gush of sea breeze to the face.

Because every French restaurant we passed seemed to only have meals for about 17€ and we are all about that cheap student life, we opted for Asian food in the semi-sketchy immigrant section of the city.  But don't worry, nervous parents, we had Jack-the-struggling-British-musician to protect us!  And also Tina-who-studies-in-Madrid.  We were feeling really friendly before dinner and decided to take the solo-travelers under our wings.  Which ended up working out pretty well when Jack the Brit was the only one who talked to the French waitresses all night.

On Sunday our return flight wasn't until late so we wandered on over to the other side of the port to explore the new Musée des Civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée, which is far too difficult to even try pronouncing, but luckily this is a blog so you won't have to. Unless you are reading my blog aloud to a crowd of avid listeners in which case I hope you speak French.  It was great, the highlight being that it was inside the ancient fortress #historymajor.  Although we had to cross some high pedestrian bridges to get there which slightly unnerved the one that's scared of heights (me) especially when the sunny morning turned into a wind tunnel of an afternoon.

Really, the only blip in our perfect, relaxing weekend was that on the way back our flight was delayed and the airport was an icebox.  Which was mostly made better when I discovered the hot chocolate machine in the corner.  A wonderful weekend in a new city with new friends.

Post Script: Marissa and I went and hunted down "El Rinconcillo" the oldest bar in Sevilla one afternoon. Within the half hour of us standing at the counter and drinking our house wine and munching our sheep cheese (yeah I've never heard of that either) we were given flowers and a handwritten note from an adorable 80-90 year old man in a perfect suit.  He came over from his spot in the corner where he comes every day between 6 and 9 (we asked) to deliver his gifts and then quietly returned to drink his cruzcampo.  We are "the flowers of his Sevilla." 15 minutes later he brought us more flowers and another note.  To the lovely old gentleman - thanks for the pick-me-up.  Made my day.


Shoutout to Jackie Edelson on her 21st birthday!!! Hope you're livin' large in New Zealand.