Christmas in Marseille

For Christmas, in order to kind of get out of my house and away from the throngs of visitors and family that I did not know, we decided to escape to Marseille (where Laurent lives). My landlords' son and daughter had been hanging around for a couple days and I was getting really uncomfortable. So, after a simple train trip of an hour and 40 minutes, we arrived in Marseille. Now, I had been told that Marseille was a bit more "urban" than the other cities in the area. I thought it was great. Now grant it, I have been to Marseille a handful of times, but never really seen much of the city besides a couple places that Laurent drove me to or the mall. This trip was special since we walked all over downtown and the surrounding areas. Laurent and his whole family were in Paris over our Christmas time trip, so we got a whole apartment to ourselves. The weather was really gorgeous for the majority of the trip which made sightseeing much more entertaining. We saw the Palais de Longchamps which you can see below. It was amazingly huge and only a couple block away from Laurent's place! I never knew!!
We then walked all the way downtown. Now, I say all the way because you are basically just walking down a big hill to get downtown. We saw this really strange long block called "Saint's Row". There were all these stalls selling saints and other manger accoutrement (including little animals)! It was a little strange and plentiful. After "Saint's Row", we walked down to the sea. There was this awesome bell show. Bells and video below. This man was basically playing a piano where all the strings were attached to these bells and Christmas carols came out. I was blown away and you can see the crowd was pretty huge in that area.




After a cafe and some souvenir shopping, we ended up kind of wandering around the area waiting for dinner time. We ran into Laurent's church which was beautifully lit as you can see here. Dinner was great, as usual. We had muscles, seafood soup, seafood spaghetti and muscle stew. Wonderful! The seafood there, you have to assume, is super fresh since they are literally, fishing right off the dock.

Christmas eve was spent wandering around downtown again and finally finding the museum called "La Vielle Charite" that had a special Van Gogh/Monticelli exposition. After about an hour of trying to find this hidden gem, we succeeded. I wish I knew that art students got in for free! I got in for half price but since Will said he was an art student, free! If only I knew! Well, it was cool anyway since you got to see the influence that Monticelli had on Van Gogh. They had a lot of paintings side by side in comparison so you could really see how influential Monticelli became for Van Gogh even though they knew each other a very short time. We did try to go to midnight mass at Laurent's church and even though the sign said the doors were open at 11:30pm, when we got there at 11:37pm, it was packed! Standing room only. Well, I mean, I wanted to go but didn't want to stand for the hour long mass or even longer. So after 10 minutes of standing around hoping to get a seat, we gave up and went back home. I was really disappointed because the church was beautifully decorated. Here is a picture of the church right before sunset.


Christmas day, like in America, was spent indoors and watching "A Christmas Story" and other Christmas-y movies. Everything was closed, as in the US, so we really couldn't go anywhere anyway. I made an awesome dinner though (as seen below). I'm really quite proud of myself. I made lemon-garlic salmon (with super fresh salmon from the market), real mashed potatoes, brocolli, cauliflower and some sort of weird hybird vegetable that came with it and dessert was awesome! It was like a chocolately, nutty goodness puree in a flaky crust, topped with coconut sorbet. We were stuffed! Food picture below.



Some of the seafood shops on the street:


The weather on the day after Christmas was kinda cruddy so we just walked down to the mall, looked at all the crap and then meandered the area until it was time to go. I leave you with this funny picture of me with my scarf. Yes, it was chilly most of the time we were there and this is proof.