After my time in Nice, I moved on to five days in Marseille. I had expected to like it more than Nice, and so had planned to spend my birthday there.
It didn’t quite go as I expected really. I did have the smoothest train catching of my time to date in France, so that was exciting! My AirBnB was easy to find, and the owner was very nice and very through in her rundown of the property.
I did my traditional “first day in a new place” wander, seeing the outside of the Cathedrale de la Major, and then walking around Old Port. I found a delightful sea-themed bookstore, and I am still, over three months later, still a little sad that I didn’t get one of the books I looked at. A little further round is the Abbaye Saint-Victor, and I dragged myself there before stumbling back, completely exhausted. Eventually dinner called, and I did venture out again a little later, to sample some Bouillabaisse, which the region is famous for. I went to a little side street restaurant though, because I could not bring myself to pay almost $80-$100 Australian for a bowl of soup! Yes, the most famous one in the area, which gets shared around multiple restaurants, is about 50€ per bowl!
Then next day I did Cathedrale de la Major properly, which was quite nice, and went to Mucem, which wasn’t. The discount with my teaching card there wasn’t what I expected it to be, and then the displays themselves were quite dull. It was largely dedicated to the Mediterranean diet, and I did not feel that it was worth my time.
This left me a little disheartened, and I wandered a bit further inland for a while, and did some grocery shopping.
Finally, I decided I would go check out the Marseille History Museum, which my host had said was both free and very good. I’d been sceptical but I got a free audio guide and it was riveting! In the end, I got kicked out at closing time. Much better than the museum visit that I actually paid for!
It’s quite interesting because of how the city has balanced its preservation of history, alongside the growing needs of its inhabitants.The museum is connected to a large shopping centre, and has a large park out the front. When the new shopping centre was being built, they discovered old ruins buried underground when they were digging to lay the foundations.
There was a bit of a to-do, but in the end, they agreed on a partial preservation, with part of the ancient floor left undisturbed for viewing and relics from the dig put into the new museum alongside the shopping centre.
It was well worth the visit.
My middle day in Marseille was my birthday! It was forecast to be stormy that day, so I had already made plans for it to be a rest and writing day. This worked out well because I was under the weather myself that day. I blame the Monaco train coughers. I had thought I was just fatigued but a few days later it became a fair bit worse. I made my first ever order on Uber Eats so I didn’t have to go anywhere, hoping that a rest day would help me feel better.
The next day I masked up, just in case, and found that walking and being out in the air (even with the mask) made me feel so much better, so I stuck to those kinds of activities in the open air. I did a little open-air train car tour up to the Catholic church on the hill: Basilique Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde (Basilica of Our Lady of the Guard) or “La Bonne Mere” – the Good Mother, as the locals say. It’s called this because there is a golden statue on top of Mary holding baby Jesus. They say she watches over the city and the sailors out at sea.Then I wandered and sat in the Old Port again for a while.
Then next day was much the same, but I sat up top in a boat (still masked). I wandered along one of the Islands of Friuli. The rest of the boat trips had all been cancelled due to weather, but you could still go to two of the Friuli Islands (they are joined by a bridge).I had the most delightful time. There was only really time for me to walk one island properly, so I will have to go back another time to walk the other island. It is very beautiful and feels quite wild and secluded.
Sadly, that was my last real day in Marseille, so I could not do the other island. I had to catch a train back to Paris. I hid out in my AirBnB in Paris, just resting and trying to get back to 100% ready for the start of the next term, which did work, although it was a waste of my days in Paris.
It is difficult to know quite what to do when you get sick on the road. If you’re home, you can just not leave. But it is harder when you are already on the move and in someone else’s house – not even an empty AirBnB or hotel room – and you cannot just stay and wait it out. Figuring out the responsible choice is difficult when there are fewer options available to you. And especially when it is so difficult for me to be certain that I am actually, what I call, “regular person sick”. Currently I am one year and three months into being symptomatic from an ear infection that I have had multiple cleared swabs from. I also spent three weeks lying lowly recently, certain each week that I was going to get sick over the weekend. It seems to simply be that my body does not know how to handle the constant switching back and forth from being outside in cold Normandy weather and inside with toasty French heaters.
I suppose I had Covid in Marseille, and I did my best to act like it, but it could have been a cold, although at its peak it felt most like the bought of bronchitis I had two or three years back. But it could also have just been my body shutting down, because it tends to have that reaction to holidays.
Near the start of Covid, there was a meme going around about how normal sick people stayed home and rested, but people with Covid got on planes and shook hands with everyone they met. But things are never as simple as we’d like them to be. You don’t always know you’re sick. You can’t always freeze where you are if you think you are getting sick, or become properly sick on the way.
Public attitudes to sickness have changed so much in the last few years, and I do feel that we have a social responsibility to each other in this regard. But I laboured over it and I was still quite unsure of what to do in my own situation. The truth is often nuanced. That doesn’t lend itself well to narrative, and more people cling to narrative than they know. We like to tell simple stories, but not all truths are simple.
I suppose the simplest way I can tell this one, though heavily from my own perspective, is like this: I got sick two thirds of the way into my holiday. I did the best I could. I hope it was enough.
