White stuff

Marseille is located in the south of France, right on the Mediterranean Sea. The coast is known as the Côte d'Azur, the blue coast, and people come here to enjoy the warm and pleasant summers and year-round pleasant temperatures. The coast is dotted with famous sea resorts like Cannes, Saint-Tropez, Nice, Monaco, and numerous others. Therefore, there is absolutely no reason to prepare for winter. The buildings have only very perfunctory heating, cars have summer tires, and I am told that the city does not own a snowplow. That's ok because it never gets cold here.

Except when it does. Last week it snowed. In Marseille, the snow barely reached the ground and ended up as an a little ice on the cars. But the inland villages and hills found themselves covered in snow, which quickly formed a solid ice sheet on the roads that stayed on the ground for days.

Traffic immediately became a swirling chaos. Some of my colleagues called in to say they'd be working from home because there is no way to drive to work, as long as several centimeters of this strange slippery stuff is on the ground. My Canadian friends found this very funny.

These pictures were taken near Aubagne, some 20km east of Marseille:

The Count of Monte Cristo slept here

The Count of Monte Cristo is one of Alexandre Dumas' most famous books. It's about the sailor Edmond Dantès who, in the early 19th century, is unjustly imprisoned for fourteen years on the prison island of Château d'If, before escaping and taking revenge on his accusers. Great story.

Château d'If is an island in the Mediterranean Sea, just off the old harbor of Marseille. They'd be crazy if they didn't turn the place into a major tourist trap. So they've got a boat, the Edmond Dantès, ferrying tourists to the island. (Right now it's closed for construction, which will take an unspecified but large amount of time.) The island itself is rocky, like all the coast around here, with steep cliffs and a smallish fort, built to guard the entrance to Marseille's harbor with big cannons. The cannons were never used, and the fort eventually did become a prison.

It's really just a square building with a small square courtyard in the middle, and three round towers at the corners, one being taller than the others. The prison cells are dark caverns, but if a prisoner had the funds he could ask for a first-class cell that came with a fireplace, minibar, a window, and concierge service. Edmond Dantès, however, had to make do with the dungeons in the story.

Being fictional apparently didn't stop poor Edmond from digging an actual hole to the neighboring cell, an important part of the plot. They'll proudly show you the hole. To prove it's real they have TV sets showing segments from an old black-and-white movie based on the book. Edmond Dantès, As Seen On TV. In the story he takes the place of a dead fellow inmate and gets thrown over the walls into the sea, which I thought was very brave because I don't see any place where he wouldn't hit the rocks at the bottom of the walls. The TV displays do not attempt to address this problem.

Fortunately they didn't turn the whole island into a Disneyland. There are some historical displays, a gift shop, and a restaurant, but the island still feels like the forlorn rocky outpost that it once was. You can freely wander around, up to the edge of the ramparts; I didn't see a single Slippery When Wet sign. When I was there, it was mating season for the seagulls who were staging air raids on me. You can also visit several other similar islands, collectively known as the îles de Frioul, which are larger but just as forlorn and completely lack attractions. I am told bird watchers go there but my interest in birds doesn't extend beyond the edges of my plate.

Notre Dame de la Garde

Marseille has lots of churches, but Notre Dame de la Garde is the mother of them all. It perches on top of a big hill just south of the old harbor, overlooking the city. It's Marseille's #1 tourist attraction. Getting up there is a long march up steep hills, unless you want to join the old ladies who ride up a ridiculous little toy train from the harbor. Personally I prefer the route through the Jardin de Puget, a small but pretty and relaxing park shielded from the city by many trees, with great views. Marseille is a little short on parks.

The view from the terrace up there is terrific. You get a panorama of the harbor, the little islands out on the sea, and the whole city of Marseille with the mountains as an inland backdrop. No point in Marseille is higher than Notre Dame de la Garde. The only problem is that ugly modern buildings tend to be higher than old buildings, so even though Marseille is an ancient city full of beautiful old buildings (at least downtown), from above it's the modern abominations that stick out. Here's the old harbor in the foreground, with the modern harbor in the background:

The church is nice enough outside. But inside it's one of the most beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful, church I have ever seen. So many churches are gloomy, echoing caverns, built to intimidate, full of imperial-looking marble statues keeping watch over the visitors; but this church is bright and cheerful with white, red, and gold.

There are some pretty weird details inside. It's a catholic basilica and catholics have this tendency towards superstition and gruesome souvenirs like mummified bones of saints, and I believe there are enough Certified Splinters of the True Cross to build a dozen crosses. But catholics have this peculiar nonaggression pact with objective truth so that's ok. There are various beautifully crafted relic containers scattered about this church, and little boat models are suspended from the ceiling. Not just ancient ones but also fairly modern ship models. Apparently that's a form of rain dance: you sacrifice a ship to the church to ward off misfortune, just like a caveman sacrificing a chicken to whatever vengeful gods they had in those days. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.


While I am writing this I am backing up a notebook hard disk that has started to make worrisome noises; maybe I should have donated a disk in time? I can picture the stuff they'd hang from the ceiling if the sacrifice arrangements were still open for business: hard disks, iPhones, car clutches, Gawker accounts, mortgage-backed securities...

The odd thing is that many people here are taking this seriously. In northern Europe, churches are usually tourist attractions or event locations or whatever pays for the upkeep, but the religious services for which they were built attract just a handful of old people. Not so here. A mass can actually fill up a church, and people come to pray.

Notre Dame de la Garde, like a pretty large percentage of all Christian churches, is dedicated to Mary, mother of God. There are way more churches dedicated to her (notre dame, our lady), where the faithful pray to her, than to Jesus and God himself, the other main characters in the Christian pantheon. In my book that makes her a goddess. They've also got hundreds of saints specializing in various vocations such as protecting travelers, available for praying to; they fill the role of demi-gods in older religions except that they are all born Muggles. But Christianity's founding myth is, of course, anathema to such interpretations because they've made up their own myths over the past two millennia. All this is very confusing. I just go there to take pictures, and take refuge in the fact that blasphemous questions are no longer answered with torture and death. What remains is the beauty of Europe's cathedrals.

There's also a crypt under the church, but it's quite plain and poorly ventilated, and gets hot and stuffy in the summer. Not much to see there. If you want to see a spectacular crypt, go to Siena.

First day of spring

Well, it's actually one of the first days of the year, but it feels like spring. While the northern parts of France and Europe are mostly worrying what to do with all the snow, and preparing for flooding, we are enjoying the first days of spring in Marseille. The temperatures reached almost 20 degrees, and the sun was shining and quite warm. So, after shopping on the open-air markets of La Plaine and Marché des Capucins, I went to my favorite square just around the corner, Cours Julien. This picture is from last summer:

I was having a thoroughly southern French day there: lunch at one of my favorite restaurants, Le jardin d'à coté, daring to order an entrecote à point. The restaurants, like all its neighbors, has extensive outdoor seating space. I was sitting in the sun, wearing a T shirt, watching children play, families eat, old ladies having wine and coffee, and harried waiters ferrying food out as fast as they could, because all of their 20 or more tables were taken. The guests were enjoying the sun, having a good time, and in no hurry at all. An accordion player was playing French chansons that could be right out of le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (great movie btw if you like Paris). These pictures are from today:

I spent the rest of the afternoon walking about town, the harbor, up to the panier with its narrow crooked streets up and down the hill, and downtown. The Christmas shopping crowds are gone, and there are no tourists at this time of the year. Their loss.

I think I'll start a little series in this blog on parts of Marseille and surrounding villages I have visited. The burning barricades, smoking garbage piles, robberies, and other excitements are behind us; let's pretend that 2011 is going to be nice. At least until they start burning barricades and garbage again.

Maggie where are you?

Today I left home for my winter vacation. The flight was supposed to connect in Paris because Marseille, even though it's France's second-largest city, has very few useful connections anywhere. It's a provincial airport, like all airports in France except Paris CDG, but unfortunately it has managed to attract very few budget airlines.

Early in the morning Air France sent mail, announcing that the flight is cancelled, thank you for your understanding, pleasy do not reply. What makes them think that I would understand anything? I went to the airport, and KLM got me routed through Amsterdam. KLM, even though it's owned by Air France now, knows how to deal with an emergency.

The emergency being, of course, the usual French blight hurting everyone who wants to get something done. Three days before Christmas the Marseille airport security was on strike, so noone could fly. Riot police got called in. That strike has ended but now workers at the factory that supplies the Paris airport with glycol were on strike, on December 24. Glycol is needed to de-ice airplanes; it's still very cold in Paris. So they cancelled half of all flights from France's central air hub.

Amsterdam is also in the grip of the harsh winter this year, and the airport is seriously busy and affected by the strain the winter is putting on all of northern Europe. But my connection in Schiphol was perfectly punctual. The Dutch know how to run a business.

I like France but I am beginning to lose patience with this dysfunctional country. Mrs Thatcher, where are you when we need you?

Silent zoo

Marseille has a zoo, the Jardin Zoologique. It's not huge, but it's a beautiful park in a city that doesn't have a lot of green spaces. You enter through the Palais Longchamp. Zoo entrances don't come much more grandiose than this:

Inside is a well-manicured park with numerous little asphalt trails looping through the grounds. There are many old trees, and lawns that are actually legal to sit on. That's very rare in French cities, normally a uniform will rush at you whenever you look like you'd defile their sacred lawns by setting foot on it. There is a playground, families with children, joggers, and a generally tranquil setting very far away from Marseille's bustle.

The one thing that Marseille's zoo doesn't have is animals. None. At all.

Even dogs aren't welcome. There is a small space set aside for dogs, like smokers at airports, with a sign on the gate that carefully categorizes dogs as legal, illegal, and very illegal. All those looping paths are completely pointless, they go nowhere and loop back on themselves as if to say, oh well, never mind, what was I thinking.

And that's a good thing. Because before the zoo closed in 1987, they did have animals, and there are still a number of rusting hulks of cages. Very small cages, and very depressing. When they built them in 1854 they were probably state of the art, and old pictures show ladies in big floor-length dresses with hats and parasols enjoying themselves, but no animal larger than a cockroach could lead a decent life in one of these cages. Some of the walls have paintings of what the artist might have considered a natural environment, but only animals with extremely poor eyesight could have been fooled by them. Somehow they make the whole thing even more depressing.

The old reports don't say what happened to the animals when the zoo's money ran out. Probably went into a bouillabaisse.

The Palais Longchamp today houses the Natural History Museum. It's the old kind of museum, with many rows of antique display cases filled with insects and bats, carefully pinned to hand-written cards with latin names in beautiful century-old handwriting; tons of fossils and stuffed birds and fish, and a room with giraffes and other exotica. (Hm, maybe those are the zoo guests that escaped the bouillabaisse.) The museum's presentation is more interesting than its contents, but they are certainly trying.

Really English.

A couple of weeks ago I was talking about the difficulties the French are having with the English language, which is really an unnecessary luxury best left to foreigners. But every marketeer and creative ad agency "artist" firmly believes that their message is cool and compelling only if it has some English words in it. Nobody told them that normal people see this as pathetic and pretentious.

So, suppose you are selling something profane like sweaters. If you are one of the aforementioned advertising droids, you'll come up with something like this, which I saw at a bus stop today (cropped from the full poster):

A cashmere is a goat that is really successful, I see. Boring. Let's put an English word in it to spice up the message. "Really" is the best victim because the sentence doesn't need it, better play it safe. And let's put it in quotes too, those French ones that look like double angle brackets, to make it absolutely clear that this is not a typo but intentional and a quote and you aren't supposed to understand it, keep going, there is nothing to see here.

Noticed the little asterisk after "really"? Asterisks are normally used in French cell phone contracts and mean "just kidding, this is all a beautiful lie, read the twenty pages of extremely fine all-caps print in light gray on white taped to the underside of the carpet in our Kuala Lumpur branch office". So let's go looking for the legal footnote. Yes, there it is, sideways in small print at the bottom left edge of the poster:

I can't tell you what the number means, probably printer's code for "if you are reading this you are a nerd". But vraiment is indeed the French word for really. You have to admire the earnest desire of the designer to be properly understood. I need a shower.

Paradise freezes over

The summer is clearly over, but that doesn't mean the same there here at the Mediterranean Sea as it does further north. I still ride 21km to work, by bicycle, in shorts. But not every day anymore, sometimes it's a little cool in Marseille and when it's cool in Marseille it can be positively cold out in the hills, where frigid winds blow down from the Alps. Meanwhile, Paris has come to a standstill because the weather has turned it into a full-blown disaster zone, two days ago they had 11 cm of snow!

Wait, 11 cm, four inches, a hand's width? Throws one of the largest European cities into chaos? I polled some Canadian friends and they found this very funny. Two meters of snow won't stop a Canadian. I have seen people in Montréal, Quebec, walk around in shorts while it was snowing in May. These people pay no attention whatever to 11 cm of snow. But Paris wasn't prepared. Two years ago it was snowing very lightly in Marseille, an unheard-of phenomenon, and Marseille is even less prepared for such a natural disaster. This city of one million does not own a snowplow or any other kind of suitable equipment. So they closed all the schools and stayed at home, waiting for armageddon to end, while parked cars gently drifted to the bottoms of the hills.

The city of Dresden in the east of Germany not far from the Polish border, had temperatures of -24 degrees centigrade a couple of weeks ago. Now that might get a passing notice from Canadians, in early December at least. It's not supposed to do that in early December, if at all. I have walked to work in Montréal in -25 degrees in January and it's hard to breathe in these temperatures. Marseille dropped to 5 degrees that week and I saw ice on the puddles out in the countryside. No bicycle that day.

Today we had 6 degrees at night and 14 during the day. That sounds warm for December in Europe but consider that these people are not good at installing proper heating. They don't have to be, normally. My three-room apartment has exactly one gas-fired radiator in the hallway. My hallway, and only my hallway, is very warm. I use a large fan to blow the warm air into the living room and close all other doors, and I have stuffed styrofoam into the fireplace because cold air (even hail, once) enters through the chimney. I can't actually use the fireplace because they run antenna cables through the chimneys. The French would rather be cold than give up TV.

I was hoping to show some pretty Christmas decorations in Marseille, but there isn't much to see. They decorated rue Saint-Ferréol, the main shopping street, put three or four rides on La Canebière, and hung a few lights in the trees. I have seen more than that in Bangkok last year and Christmas has exactly zero tradition there. Some pictures, taken on Ferréol, rue de la République, and Canebière:

That's pretty much it, Marseille before Christmas, now you've seen it. Nothing at all like the Champs-Elysées in Paris, now that is a sight in December.

The one thing that seems curiously out of proportion here is the Christmas market on Place du Général de Gaulle. There are maybe 30 large booths, all selling the same thing: little painted clay figurines for nativity scenes. Armies of little Josephs, Marys, Jesuses, and wise men, plus auxiliary personnel and some donkeys. Who buys all this stuff? There must be a huge market for it. You can buy them unpainted as well. They don't do it for the tourists because there aren't a lot of tourists here at this time of the year. (Which is surprising, considering the ongoing end of the world in Paris.)

World Heritage Burger

So UNESCO gave us a new world heritage: the French Cuisine. A good choice. The French take eating seriously, but only at the correct time of the day. Lunch is served from 12:00 to 14:00, and dinner starts at 20:00 but you'll have no problems getting a table at 20:00 because most people won't show up before 22:00. Law requires that working hours are posted at companies, and the lunch hour is a generous 90 minutes. We need the time.

Lunch begins with an apéritif, a drink. Usually that's a table wine. Then follows the entrée, an appetizer. The plat, the main dish, follows. Finally, there is a dessert, and coffee. If you are in a hurry, you may drop either the appetizer or the dessert, or combine dessert and coffee into a café gourmand, a coffee with several miniature desserts on a plate. Dinner is the same procedure, except more elaborate. I have eaten at many wonderful places - see my September Bouillabaisse article for an example, and I have eaten at various famous Parisian restaurants, and my newest discovery here in Marseille is a great French place called les pieds dans le plat, the feet in the plate. And the French love to have lunch outdoors, like in this picture from Aix-en-Provence:

When you order meat, you'll be asked about the cuisson: how would you like your meat? You'd be tempted to say "medium", but in France the categories are shifted. They like their meat (red meat at least) nearly raw. Saignant, bloody, is just that: lightly singed from both sides but basically raw in the middle. And there is another category below that, bleu, which means blue and describes the color on your face if you take a bite. So, ask for bien cuit, well cooked, or at most à point, if you don't want your food to crawl off your plate.

You are not supposed to just "grab a sandwich". Sandwich places exist but I haven't found a good one; besides, everything from gyros and kebap to ham and cheese sandwiches look alike - a baguette filled with stuff and French fries. Ice cream parlors are so-so despite the proximity of Italy, and the fact that they invariably proclaim themselves to sell glaces artisanales, maybe best translated as homemade ice cream. All Asian restaurants are, at best, rather mediocre because there are so few Asians around here in Marseille. Another place near work, called Buffalo Grill, is a charming burger emporium where everything is decorated Texan style but it's a hilariously obvious veneer on a French restaurant. At least I have never been offered French vin de pays to drink and crème brûlée for dessert in a Texan burger joint.

What the UNESCO maybe doesn't realize that underneath all this attention to excellent food, France has a big underground of junk food. Pizza is everywhere, and it's usually some sad mushrooms and olives frozen in a sea of gelled yellowish cheese. They'll warm it up for you. Dino's pizza near work is known to make pizzas with a black charred outer rim ever since they opened their doors. Fast food flourishes most in the USA but only McDonalds has a significant presence here; the French have their very own fast food chain called Quick that looks like McDonalds, except that the food - if you can believe it - tastes worse.

In the name of science I went to a Quick today. With the world heritage award in my mind, I took them at their word and ordered their current flagship product, a Supreme Cheese Bacon everything burger and took it home for analysis. After careful dissection it turns out to be a bland pile of mushed stuff that looks almost totally unlike the pictures above the counter. I have been taught to not throw away food but since there is evidently nothing at a Quick restaurant that deserves this description, I binned it after a few disgusting bites.

The French are great bakers. From my living room window I can see four boulangeries, and their croissants, baguettes, and other pastries are just glorious. The French are masters at tartes and petits-fours as well; nobody in the world does it better. But all the bread is white, if you want dark or whole-grain bread you'll have to buy German bread.

There is much more to be said about French food, but I'll leave that for another post.

Graffiti

Since the big garbage strike is over, tourists from Singapore no longer automatically get heart attacks when visiting Marseille. But Marseille, especially the Cours Julien area where I live, is covered with graffiti. In Singapore, they cane graffiti artists. Here they don't. Graffiti is on the walls, the street, road signs, sometimes across windows and doors. Nobody paints cars; cars are sacred even here. It's very rare to see graffiti being removed, it just covers entire street blocks from one end to the other. Some shops pay graffiti artists to paint their steel shutters, so at least they decide what people see.

A good deal is actual interesting, not the mindless tags thrown up in seconds by vandals elsewhere. People take pictures of the graffiti, like me:

Well done, but of course nothing can touch the master. Search Google for Banksy:

http://www.google.com/images?oe=UTF-8&gfns=1&q=banksy&hl=en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=uljpTLfwC4HGlQeUlLCpCw&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CDMQsAQwAA&biw=1280&bih=1284