Marseille is one of those places that I've been meaning to get to for absolutely ages. I didn't know all that much about it, other than it's the second city of our nearest neighbour and it begins with M, which is always a good sign for a city; I thought I would kinda like it but I really wasn't expecting this. It's all on hills and it's all made out of pink marble. I thought it was going to be flat, modern and industrial like Hamburg or Rotterdam. I didn't think that stepping out of Gare St Charles would give me a Wow moment with its marble staircase and view of Notre Dame. I wasn't expecting this 2600 years of history that keeps getting dangled in front of my face. Marseille gets a massive thumbs up.
Another city that I've been meaning to go to for ages is Carcassonne. Turns out how I imagined Carcassonne was impossibly romantic. I thought I actually knew things about the city. In retrospect everything I know is either based on Labyrinth (Mosse not Bowie, no Bog of Eternal Stench, although I will leave that open for you to insert your own stereotype joke) - which was mainly set 800-odd years ago (I've made that number up fact fans) so is possibly not the most reliable tourist guide - or the board game (and I didn't knowingly meet a robber, a monk, a farmer or a knight, although there was an awful lot of knight-based tat). I was expecting a medieval walled city pretty much on its own, operating as an actual working town. That's not what it was like. First off it was pretty far from a working town. It was faux-medieval and nose to armpit packed with people buying cassoulet and wooden swords. Not quite as romantic as I'd envisaged. It wasn't even a solo settlement - and I should have picked this up from the boardgame - there's a second walled city within about 400m. T'uh. Carcassonne was approximately as disappointing as Marseille exceeded expectations, so far I'm rocking an expectation neutral weekend.
The only thing that I did know about Marseille is that I needed to eat a bouillabaisse. How is bouillabaisse a thing? It was a murky, brown puddle of sand and shrimp legs. It was like eating a rockpool only didn't taste as fresh.
No comments:
Post a Comment