Marseille I: First glipse of the Sea

At the beginning of December, my dormmates and I took a trip to Marseille in the south of France. It was a good weekend, but so much colder than we thought! As much as I've previously traveled around Europe, this was the first time I had ever seen the Mediterranean Sea (which I still have to look up whenever I spell it). I was pretty excited, let me tell you! Below the fold you'll find some pictures from our time there.

First time seeing the Sea!

 Beauty!

 Notice the palm tree on the left. I've only seen palms trees in three other places: California, South Carolina, and Kenya.

My dormmates and I arrived at the Marseille airport around midnight. The other two Americans, Andrea and Taylor, caught a long taxi-ride (around 50 euro) into town to their over-priced hotel while Stefan, the German assistant, and I caught a short taxi-ride (around 8 euro) to our budget hotel right next to the airport. Unfortunately I didn't get any photos of the room, but we both started laughing when we saw it. Well, it wasn't really the room that we laughed at; it was the bathroom. It reminded one of an airplane WC with a curtain hung across half of it. Behind the curtain was the shower, but there was litterally only about a foot between the wall and the curtain. For Europeans, this might be fine, but for this fat American, I couldn't believe it. I kept kicking the toilet through the curtain while I was trying to avoid bashing my head against the wall as I soaped up. Fortunately, the shower head was one of those ones that comes off the wall, so I could rinse without endangering various limbs.

Stefan's shower story was probably more dramatic: I was bumping my head on the bathroom ceiling when I stood on my toes, and he's about a foot taller than I. Somehow he forgot to tell me about his shower experience.

But then, of course, the entire bathroom was soaked, including the mirror, because the curtain failed to properly shield the water. And the floor of the "shower" was separated from the floor of the bathroom with a half-a centimeter drop. In other words, the floor of the bathroom was flooded by the time one got out of the shower. Fortunately, Stefan and I took this with a fair amount of humor. After all, we'd saved more than half the money Taylor and Andrea had spent on their cushy taxi ride and however-many-star hotel.

Little did we know what adventure awaited us the next morning...