Sunny, Spicy Marseille

Once Marseille was primarily a port city, a favorite of sailors looking for a good time. It’s grown up now, France’s third largest city, with 1.2 million souls, many of African and Arab descent. The streets teem with young families and children, and every sea of faces displays a range of human coloration. This young, multicultural population gives Marseille a unique flavor.

The Vieux Port, a narrow rectangle crammed with fishing boats and sailboats at anchor, marks the tourist’s heart of the city. Five lanes of dented, honking Renaults and Peugeots zoom down la Canabiere, the thoroughfare dubbed "the can o’ beer" by English-speaking sailors of yore, and careen to the left or the right onto the six whizzing lanes of the Quai des Belges at the Port. This intersection is a handy reference point. The tourist information office is here, and it’s centrally located and a bus and Metro hub for the city. Many buildings resemble those of historic Paris – six stories, tall narrow windows, shallow wrought-iron balconies – but rather than smog-stained brown, they’re pale tan or pink or pale blue.

Some must-sees for Marseille:

• At the fish market set up on the Quai des Belges from 9 to noon every morning, you can watch the local housewives pick out their fish still flapping in shallow wooden trays of water and check out the local varieties of shellfish.
  
• Vallon des Auffes is a tiny, lovely old harbor neighborhood tucked just off the road that runs along the Marseille’s coast southeast of the Vieux Port. The bus ride there is an attraction itself.
  
• Notre Dame de la Garde stands watch over the city from its hill perch and offers matchless views over the city. On the way back down to the Vieux Port, stop at the older, simpler, fortified Abbaye St. Victor.
  
• Dumas’ fictional Count of Monte Cristo was unjustly incarcerated in the infamous Chateau d’If prison on an island in Marseille’s harbor. Get information and tickets at the SNCM ferry kiosk at Quai des Belges.
  
• Santons are Provençal nativity figures. Marcel Carbonel Santons, a major santon producer, has a workshop and museum where you can learn a little about the santon tradition and maybe pick out some for yourself.
  

If you prefer big-city nightlife, Marseille makes a great home base with side excursions to nearby Aix-en-Provence and Cassis.

Quick Tips:

Marseille had a rough reputation in the past, but the city is now about as safe as most major cities. As in any other city, it’s wise to stay alert and pay attention to your pockets and your possessions, but even as a woman traveling solo, I never felt threatened. Nonetheless, the rather seedy Quartier Belsunce (between the train station and rue de la République) is better avoided after dark.

Marseille is both a business and a tourist destination, so hotels tend to book up any time of year, both weekdays and weekends. It’s a good idea to get a reservation at least for the night you arrive – the sooner the better. I had some difficulty finding an available hotel meeting my modest quality standards a month before my late May arrival.

Eating in Marseille is an adventure. Be bold! You will not be sorry. Marseille’s most famous dish is bouillabaisse, a spicy fish and shellfish stew ladled out at many restaurants. There are also a number of interesting ethnic restaurants. Look for an opportunity to try couscous, a North African dish.

Best Way To Get Around:

Much of what you’ll be interested in seeing in Marseille is do-able on foot, but there is a wonderful public transportation system; why not use it? The Metro is clean and efficient, and the bus system is great. Individual tickets good for bus, tram or Metro are €1.40. A day pass is €4.00, or you can buy a Carte Liberté for 6 or 12 rides (€6.50/€13.00). Stamp your card when entering a bus or tram; you can transfer for free for an hour. Splitting my sightseeing between walking, the metro, and buses, I got by with a 6-ride Carte plus two individual tickets for a three-day stay.

I’m very comfortable with big-city driving at home, but personally, I wouldn’t choose to get around Marseille by car. Parking is a major problem, not to mention maneuvering through the careening traffic and crazy streets with signs in French. If arriving by car, I’d beeline for a garage and stow the car for the duration of my stay. Marseille can, however, be a great place to pick up a rental car for your countryside adventures. It’s an easy drive from the train station to the autoroute out of town.

Hotel Mascotte is a pleasant but unexciting budget hotel with a matchless location at the Vieux Port, a few doors from where la Canebiere meets Quai des Belges. The Metro stop (Vieux-Port, two stops from the train station) is half a block from the hotel, buses connecting you with the main tourist sights run along both these main streets, the SNCM office – where you can get info about boats/tickets to Chateau d’If (of Count of Monte Cristo fame), Cassis, and Corsica – is just across Quai des Belges, banks and ATMs abound, and even the Tourist Information office is just across la Canebiere. The massive Centre Bourse shopping center is within two blocks. A nice little pedestrian area with lots of restaurants is located across the street from the south end of Quai des Belges, and this is a pleasant area to spend your evenings. I stayed here my first three nights in France, and it was a great location from which to get oriented and take care of setting-up-in-France business.

The lobby is narrow but nicely appointed, with shining floors, an attractive front desk counter sweeping back along one side, a couple of cozy chairs. There is a fairly modern elevator that was consistently in operation, although it’s rather slow so I often chose to take the stairs going down. The staff speak excellent English, are quite efficient, and were very helpful and pleasant to deal with.

My twin-bedded room was clean and tidy. The décor was basic and somewhat drab, although the bedspreads were made of an attractive brocade fabric. Fortunately, the room featured large windows looking out over a tiny square and up Rue de la République. If I leaned out, I could see a corner of the Vieux-Port. Despite the heavy street traffic below, the room was reasonably quiet at night. The bathroom was spacious and clean but dimly lit, with a narrow tub and shower with excellent water pressure. The TV had two English-language stations, which were good for keeping up with international news and checking out ads for vacations to Egypt. The little mini-fridge was well-stocked.

Breakfast costs €7 extra; there are also numerous cafés in the neighborhood where you can pick up a croissant and coffee if you prefer.

I was one of the first customers at Le Mérou Bleu after they opened for the evening meal. Located in a small pedestrian district just south of the Vieux Port, "The Blue Grouper" specializes in the typical seafood dishes of the south. The tourist menu posted outside looked promising – a number of appealing complete meals for €15-20. I went in and was seated in the narrow outside area of the restaurant where I could watch the passersby.

This was the only restaurant I ate in during my entire trip in southern France where the service was snooty and unpleasant. I'm fairly certain this was mostly due to the fact that I was dining "low" on the menu and didn't order wine, as the waiter didn't initially seem unhappy that I was American or dining alone. The menu that first arrived at my table did not include the tourist menu I had seen outside. The waiter came over and recommended a bouillabaisse. Bouillabaisse (pronounced "boo-ya-base"), the signature dish of Marseille, is a spicy seafood stew built on a tomato base, but I was not feeling up to a spicy meal and it was €28 a la carte, more than I wanted to spend. I asked for the tourist menu, and with a sneer, he finally retrieved it. I don’t drink wine, and when I asked for water instead, I got an exasperated exhalation in response, although he did bring it promptly.

I chose shrimp salad appetizer, aioli entree, and crème caramel for dessert, on the prix-fixe tourist menu for €18. The salad was essentially shrimp with lettuce and a lemon wedge, and the shrimp was unpeeled, making for rather messy and uninteresting eating. The aioli was excellent, however. Aioli ("eye-oh-lee") is a traditional Provençal dish consisting of poached fish (cod in this instance) and poached vegetables – potatoes, carrots, green beans – served with a garlic mayonnaise on the side. It isn't a terribly exciting meal on the plate, since there is rather a lot of white, especially when served, as in this case, on a white plate. Nonetheless, it was delicious and filling. The crème caramel, a very common French dessert, was well executed. All in all, it was a good meal at a very good price.

Because the aioli was so good, I might have eaten here again during this trip but for my bad experience with the service.

One wonderful advantage of Marseille’s polyethnic population is a wide array of authentic ethnic eateries. Roi de Couscous, "King of Couscous," specializes in the Moroccan dish couscous, offering a dozen or so varieties. The restaurant is a small, tiled, candlelit place, really a storefront, on a main thoroughfare a few blocks north of the Vieux Port. Ambiance is rather limited, but it’s still a reasonably pleasant place. Still recovering from jet-lag a day after my arrival, I presented myself for dinner as soon as they opened at 7:00pm and had the restaurant to myself, as the urban French mostly dine after 8:00.

Couscous (rhymes with "goose-goose") is a round semolina pasta so tiny it is smaller than rice. It is steamed and served with a brothy stew, which always contains vegetables and usually meat of one or more varieties such as beef, lamb, chicken, or sausage. The stews are aromatic and herby, usually with some heat. If you don’t like spicy-hot food, you can usually arrange for the harissa, the chili sauce which is a component of many couscous dishes, to be served on the side rather than mixed in so you can control how hot your dinner is. The pasta usually arrives in a mound on a soup plate, with a small pot of stew served alongside. You lay some furrows into the pasta with the big serving spoon, spoon some broth over the top, and then serve yourself some of the chunks of stew along one side of the plate.

My lamb and vegetable couscous was excellent, with tender chunks of lamb and big pieces of vegetables with a soft but not mushy texture. The broth was flavorful and just pleasantly spicy, not enough to cause discomfort. I had crème caramel for dessert, the perfect cooling finish to a spicy meal. Service was relatively brisk for a French restaurant, where meals properly take hours, but as I was dining alone and the restaurant was empty, this was understandable and not really unwelcome. The waiter was pleasant if rather quiet.