Marseille

In Which: Our Hero Inadvertently Finds Himself In The Third Biggest City In France, Finds Somewhere To Stay, Finds Somewhere Else To Stay, And Finds Himself Grumbling In A Carpark To Which All Roads Unavoidably Hurtle.

I went to France last week. I stayed in Paris for a few days, and then, after a mighty reorganising stint and several fruitless hours of stressful booking, moved down to Marseille for the end of the week. I have lots of nice stuff to say about drinking wine and wandering around Paris, but before I write a blog about that, I would like to detail just how utterly shite Marseille is.

1) First of all it's really grubby. Most of it looks like the level of upkeep of a Ghanan village. Despite my keen style and charming looks, I am not usually a superficial person, but really. They obviously do not often entertain guests.

2) Everyone drives like a maniac. Motorcyclists regularly use the pavement when there is heavy traffic, cars in general ignore pedestrian crossing lights (and then honk and yell at you because you've had the indecency to get in their way by crossing when they're trying to cruise through a red light thus almost getting knocked down by them and nearly denting their car which is already hammered to the point of falling apart because they're all such COCKING BAD DRIVERS).

We were staying on 'Rond-Point Prado', a rond-point being a round about. This roundabout however had a road straight through the middle of it. What's the point? Honestly, what's the point in having a sodding roundabout at all if you don't even have to drive round it?

They don't have road markings in France, so people just park wherever they feel the need to. Such as on the pavement, or indeed, on a rond-point.

3) There's absolutely NOTHING to do there. We stayed for three days, and had resorted to sitting in cafés smoking after the first afternoon. The 'Major Cathedral' is literally surrounded by wasteland, the 'Champs Elysées of the South' is more akin to the grubbiest parts of East London minus any interesting shops, and the Museum of the history of Marseille is, de facto alone, a gaping void of interest. And yet somehow it is to be the European Capital of Culture in 2013. Hopefully we will all be dead by then.

4) What are described on the map as parks it actually turns out are car parks. Whilst Marseille is not necessarily the greenest city in France, it can certainly boast an impressive collection of vast, empty concrete fields.

5) There is nowhere to stay. And when we went, everywhere that did exist was fully booked because there was a music festival going on. We booked ourselves into a hostel which seemed nice enough on the website. We got there to discover it was this guy called Sam's shabby little flat with some bunk beds in. I've never seen such a poor effort at disguising a flat as a business. To the point where he insisted we took our shoes off inside. We didn't have any lockers or safes, and Hannah walked in on Sam stark naked in the unlocked bathroom.
We immediately left, cried a bit, and lugged around Marseille for a couple of hours until we found a real hotel. Sam seemed genuinely offended. I kindly detailed for him exactly where he was going wrong in his scam, and his life in general. I don't really think that made things any better.

6) The music festival was a crock of pointless turd.

I think that about rounds it up.