With France Like This, Who Needs Enemies?

Marseille

Ya, sure, it looks nice.
But it's an awful place

The unthinkable happened. After 3 weeks of a road trip, which you, our readers, know nothing about, our shiny happy fun blog has come to a shrieking hault.

So, in this blog post, we’re going to bitch and complain, air our grievances and jump ahead to modern day. Then go back and chip away at the two-month void in our travel log.

Our electronics have been stolen, along with photos from November through January. With it we lost written blog posts for five major stops on our tour, our tacky souvenir magnets we’ve pain-stakingly hand selected for awful quality and worst of all — our happiness.

Marseille It Ain’t So
We detoured our French road trip south through Marseille in search of bijoux anciens stores, which the city has many of (more on this later).

Driving into the city was an immediate nightmare. A patchwork of one way streets meeting in 5-way intersections, congested shopping boulevards bisected by a cars width lane, and direction signage that guides cars onto sidewalks without warning to pedestrians. Every parking spot in the city is paid parking, even in residential areas. It took us an hour to realize this and we drove a quarter mile on a sidewalk to get to an underground parking lot.

We set off on foot, determined to find the hidden charm of the city that was lost on us in the car. But, walking around proved not much better. We passed by homeless people on almost every corner and actual gypsies on others. With almost every step, we were either dodging dog poo or some other mystery liquid. Or, in one case, a person.

This is a photo of Marseille. 

We were crossing a street in a shopping district as a bald, thuggy looking guy in a puffy down jacket and aviators approached us. He was walking straight toward Robin, and as he got closer, he started to scratch the back of his head, sticking his elbow straight out infront of him like the bow of a ship. Robin took a couple steps aside, but he stayed locked on target and jammed his elbow right into her shoulder, just below her collar bone. We finished crossing, like two ships passing in the night, colliding, then continuing on.

It was startling and seemed like some sort of distraction a pickpocketer might use. Once we crossed the street, we both looked at the man in shock. But just as we turned to continue soaking up Marseilles, the man had somehow re-crossed the street for a confrontation. He was now gaining on us and yelling unintelligible French phrases. We walked quickly up the block with blinders on, followed by the shouting Marseillian till we ducked into a small convenience store, hoping to throw him off our track.

It worked. He was no where to be seen after we left the store, and any charm Marseille had left was gone in our eyes.

And speaking of gone...to complete our 3-day stay in Marseille, we took the advice of a desk-woman at the Tourist office to drive outside the city center along the beach, which was quite beautiful. So we set out east along the coast to begin our a 5 hour route across the whole French Riviera. Unfortunately, we didn’t realize Marseille’s local coastal roads don’t connect to any through roads to the rest of the coast.

We circled, searching our map for any kind of way out, and ended up winding around the same few surburban roundabouts. Our instincts were telling us to power through and get out of the city that had trapped us somehow, but frustration and hunger won and brought us to a quaint seaside parking lot surrounded by restaurants perfect to pop in for a quick bite to eat.

Our lunch was delicious. Eating in France has been a frustrating experience, but ironically we found a great restaurant that was affordable and had a delicious lunch. What made it ironic was at the end of the meal, David declared, “Y’know what? This is the first French meal where I’ve had nothing to complain about.” 

This is probably what it looked like when it happened. But in French.

But, at that moment we would have the most to complain about for our entire trip.

At that moment, our rental car was being expertly broken into a few meters from where we sat; targeted because of its rental license plates (we were told later by the Marseille police department).

On our last day with the car, we lost our “electronics” backpack,our beautiful new SLR, a plastic bag with our ugly magnet collection and the photos from the next 10-or-so blog entries.
We didn’t realize our “emergency” credit cards were buried deep in our document binders. It wasn’t overlooked by the thieves. They spent over $2,000 in the three hours before the fraud department got wind of what what was going on.

For insurance reasons, and being justice-loving Americans, we drove completely deflated and panicked to the Marseille police department, where we gave a report of what happened with no sympathy in return. The officer taking the report bragged to us about his 2-month visit to New York and was not even robbed once. WAY TO GO! He also told us a comforting story about have 4 pairs of shoes stolen from his car on a beach in Itlay.  He showed no interest in investigating our case, declining any information we had about where our car was or physical descriptions of the missing items.

Our beautiful sunset coastal drive turned into a dreary inland night crusade to our seaside splurge hotel to end our road trip. That night, our romantic evening turned into midnight phone calls, cancelling credit cards, changing passwords, alerting authorities and sighing painfully as we remembered other missing items and irreplaceable photos.

We visited the nearest police station the next morning, armed with a list of stores where our stolen credit card had been used, the time of purchase and the purchase amounts with hopes that one would have a surveillance camera to help catch the perp. The local police called the Marseille station and read the list of stores. They responded by asking us to call the stores on our own and ask if they had any information. So, with the help of a friendly hotel receptionist, we called all the stores the next day and 3 stores remembered the person and were prepared to describe them to the police. We called the police back with this new information — not interested.

So, we’re continuing on, like two motherbirds with a nest empty of electronics, taking each other under each other wings, spittting food into each other’s mouths. Pathetic.

In the next weeks, we’re hoping to bring our blog back up to present day, un-soured by our losses. We plan to look online for specific photos to bring the blog to life, or add a couple thousand words in their place. We’ve written a log of our favorite lost photos and might list them for our own memories.

So, moving on...