Thornock Happenings 2016: France Trip Post #6

Monday, May 19th

Monday was a cloudy, drizzly kind of day in Marseille. In France a lot of things tend to be closed on Mondays, so we decided not to use one of our Rail France travel days and spent some time in Marseille instead. We figured that since we had an apartment we should actually eat breakfast at home instead of buying it every day, so we had cereal and pain au chocolat from the grocery store for breakfast. The cereal was basically granola with chunks of chocolate in it. Mmmm.

First we set off to see Prado Market, which is run every day on Avenue du Prado (same street we walked down to get to church the day before). However, we got there and most of the vendors were packing up their stands because of the wind and the rain. We wandered through it anyway since we were there. It looked like there were lots of clothing and bags and watches and stuff rather than a food market, so we probably wouldn't have bought anything anyway.

From there, we decided to go to Longchamps Palace, which was just a few metro stops away. It was pretty cool. Check out the pictures below. There are a couple of museums associated with it but we weren't super interested in them and I think they were closed anyway. So we looked at the fountains and wandered through the gardens. Then we set off to find the Funny Zoo, which was in our Marseille tourist brochure. It was right next to the palace on the map, but we had a hard time actually getting to it.

First we ran into a few of the statues that were outside of the Zoo itself, and they were vandalized and pretty damaged. It's sad, really, but that area of Marseille has a lot of vandalism. Walking through the zoo was amusing enough, but I'm glad it was a free attraction. The Zoo, which opened in the 19th century, used to have real animals in it (in those tiny cages!) until the public demanded that it be closed. Recently they have filled it with all these fiberglass animals. Funny, huh? haha

After that, we took the metro back to Vieux Port and hopped right onto a bus that took us up to Notre Dame de la Garde. This is probably the most famous cathedral in Marseille. There was a beautiful view of the city from the cathedral, and the cathedral itself was pretty impressive. Inside it is decorated with lots of boats. The cathedral was supposed to be a spiritual lighthouse and people went there to pray for their loved ones out at sea.

By this time our bus/metro passes had expired, so we walked back down to our apartment. It was a nice walk downhill, but going up to the cathedral would have been awful, so I'm glad we took the bus on the way there! We had lunch at our apartment -- cous cous and ratatouille again. Then we took a nap.

In the evening we went out to look for an ethernet cable as a last attempt to fix our internet situation. (It didn't work, by the way.) We also stopped to pick up a baguette to go with dinner and a brioche for me. Brioche is a sweet bread that I should have eaten more of. We came home again to listen to our book some more, plan out the week ahead of us, and eat some dinner. We had paela, which is a rice and seafood dish and our baguette.

It was a good day for checking some of the things off of our Marseille to-do list.