Dusk Through Narrow Streets

Things I learned from my day in Marseille (well, actually, I have no idea whether any of these are true, it’s just stuff I observed, so…take with several grains of salt?):

• French people like dogs. A lot. I saw one in a McDonalds, for instance, and also saw a St. Bernard and a Great Dane, both of which are in the small-pony branch of dogs. French people also don’t clean up after their dogs when they poop on the sidewalk. (This might not have been dog doo, actually, but whatever it was, it showed up all over the place.)
• It rains all the time in Marseille. Poured from about noon on yesterday and rained for a while today. At least people here actually deal with this and bring out their umbrellas. On campus in Norwich, where it rains at least once a week, 3/4 of the students will run around in the rain without an umbrella. (And actually the hostel owner tells me it’s sunny 200+ days of the year. Guess it’s…just me then?)
• There are a lot of homeless people here. More than one person was camped out down at the Vieux Port, under an overhang in blankets and sleeping bags and stuff. An old church in the Panier quarter had somebody else’s sleeping bag spread out. Lots of others asking for money. Also some lady in the market tried to talk to me and, like, show me her baby? I assume she wanted money since I don’t speak French. And then she grabbed my sleeve when I was shaking me head, so that was definitely a no.
• Everyone smokes. Oh wait, that’s not a France thing, that’s a FREAKING EVERYONE IN EUROPE thing. I swear, everyone on this gorram continent must have a pack-a-day habit. (At least they don’t do it indoors like in Turkey.)
• Speaking of which, Turkey, or at least Istanbul, apparently takes a lot of its cues from France. Maybe that’s just both being Mediterranean, I don’t know, although technically Istanbul’s not on the Med at all.
• The French do street signs way better than the English. Still not quite as good as in the US, I think, but the main point is that they have street signs at every intersection. It’s wonderful.

I’m actually writing this from Marseille even though I didn’t bring my laptop, because the hostel has a computer with internet you can use for free, which is pretty awesome. The hostel itself seems pretty nice, but I can’t say a whole lot about Marseille itself except that it reminds me more of Turkey than it does of England; it’s been raining pretty much all day. My shoes are still pretty wet. All I really did today was get in, find the hostel, and buy some food at a supermarket, but seeing as I couldn’t sleep at all last night and got up at like 3:30 a.m. to get the coach to the Stansted airport, that’s kind of an accomplishment. (Oddly I’m not completely exhausted. Don’t know why.)

Due to poor planning on my part but also RyanAir’s various restrictions on their cheaper deals, I’ve ended up cramming all my remaining travel into about a week. I’m spending the weekend in Marseille, France, and getting back Monday evening; then I’m spending about half of Tuesday going to Birmingham for a Coldplay concert. And then Thursday morning I go to Katowice, Poland (main attraction for my purposes: proximity to Auschwitz), and get back Saturday evening, and…then a friend and I are doing this day-trip thing to Bruges, Belgium. Which leaves at 4 a.m. from the middle of town. And the week after that I have three papers and a presentation.

Yeah, this…this will be interesting. Especially because my coach to the Stansted airport leaves at 4:30 a.m. tomorrow, and I’ll be getting almost no sleep because, guess what, I have a gig tonight. Which I booked ages ago, but still, and I would skip it except I really like what I’ve heard. I’m also not packed and should be leaving for said gig, like, now.

I like watching stars. Don’t get to do it real often, because at home it’s pretty often cloudy in the winter when it’s dark enough to see any, and if it’s not that then the city lights are too bright. Last night I got a very clear view of the stars through Jen’s car window, oddly enough, and happened to see Orion. And that’s odd, because ordinarily I’m lucky if I can find Orion’s Belt and the Big Dipper, which is the extent of my constellation-locating skills. But last night, while I still can’t say I made out anything that really looked like a person, I could still see the stars that are supposed to be his legs and shoulders. Which is kind of cool, I guess. I don’t really know if constellations are different over here.

(An unrelated note to prove how weird I am: this entry has that specific title because I was sure Rhianna’s “Umbrella” had a line about the stars shining together in it, so I was actually going to put this on my Wordpress blog so I could upload the Mechanical Bride version of “Umbrella” that I actually like. And then I read the lyrics and realized there is nothing about stars in there at all. So much for that, then.)

I got what’s termed Fresher’s Flu at the beginning of term, despite not actually being a fresher; being new to the area and new to a dorm was more than enough for it to get me. I’d had some hopes that would be it, but no. Woke up this morning (er…well, it was this morning when I woke up…not so much when I actually got up) with a sore throat, and over the day it’s progressed into sore throat, runny nose, headache, body ache, and some dizziness from, I don’t know, messed up sinuses and inner ear and stuff.

Yaaay. The best part is I’ve more or less spontaneously decided to visit London on Wednesday (well, not really–I’d been planning to for a while because the Guillemots are playing then, and stupidly put off buying tickets, so now it’s about twice as expensive as it would be), which is great timing: I’ll still be tired from being sick, so wandering around London won’t be that great, and I’ll probably have lost my voice enough that singing along won’t be real easy. w00t.

I’d heard at some point that it’s kind of a European thing not to use deodorant. I can’t really say whether this is true (sure isn’t for England) and I’m guessing it’s far less so in general by now, at least, but I can definitely confirm that it’s true in Turkey. I know it’s all conditioning and it’s a natural smell and nobody used deodorant until the last century and stuff, but I am conditioned to it, so of course being in crowds of people smelling like BO isn’t a lot of fun.

That isn’t the point here, though. The point is that my Korean flatmate very kindly made us all a meal tonight because she wanted to cook us some Korean food, and I was eating in the kitchen with my flatmates. I kept noticing a smell I thought was in the food that reminded me strongly–and, interestingly enough, very positively–of Turkey. And then I realized I was actually smelling the guy next to me, who…I really don’t know, I suppose he might’ve been working out earlier or might’ve just not showered today. In any event, apparently body odor now smells like Turkey to me, and the weirdest bit is that I didn’t mind; I didn’t move away or anything because the sensation it evoked was a good one, even though I definitely didn’t enjoy that particular experience when I was actually in Turkey.

Had a cooking class today that was nearly all day long–figured since I’m living on my own now and will be doing so even more at some point in the nearish future, I really need to learn something. I did learn quite a bit, I think, mostly that cooking in general is not all that hard (time-consuming maybe, but not even that bad if you have decent hobs and stuff…which our kitchen does not, but okay) and that I might actually like experimenting. I didn’t really get anywhere on understanding the biscuit/cookie thing though. British do have cookies, but it’s like…all British biscuits are American cookies, but not all American cookies are British biscuits? I think? Biscuits tend to be kind of hard, flat, and dry, where if you have some nice gooey thing, it’s probably going to be a cookie even here. At least that’s what I’ve gathered, but the chef didn’t seem to think so when I tried that theory on him, so…whatever.

Anyway, the point is, we made pizzas as the final thing and got to take them back with us. Uncooked so we could have them later, though. And our kitchens don’t have ovens, right? But he said a couple minutes in the microwave and then finishing it on the grill would work. Yeah, not so much. First of all it was soft dough so hard to get on anything, and secondly the microwave did nothing to firm up the dough but melted all the cheese, and then when I put it in the grill it kind of dripped between the bars, so I put it on a tray and when I came back to check on it, the cheese was totally burnt while most of the dough was still goopy. So that was, you know, not a raging success.

I mentioned over at my other blog that England has this Thing about what does and doesn’t count as drinkable water. Apparently they have a similar Thing about business hours too. I mean, yeah, 9-5 is normal business hours, but I’m used to that being…well, for businesses. Offices, little shops maybe, that sort of thing. All the malls at home are usually open until 8 or 9 p.m., so most of the stores in them stay open until then too.

Here…not so much. Really big stores like Morrison and Toys ‘R’ Us (probably others, but those are the only ones I can think of offhand) often stay open until 9 p.m., and the Tesco Express on the corner is open 24 hours, and of course pubs are open late, but generally speaking, the whole town closes down around 5–6, if you’re lucky. If you want to be out for an evening and get some shopping done, sorry, you’re out of luck.

And that is, I’m apparently an old woman or something. Elliot Minor were playing at UEA tonight with Anberlin and the Hot Melts (I missed the latter because I showed up late, oops), and I went mostly because I like “Parallel World” and I thought it would be fun. I like Anberlin more, but I didn’t even know they were supporting Elliot Minor until after I bought my ticket.

Anyway, it was fine–probably talk about it more later on my other blog–but the problem with me is, headbanging gives me a monstrous headache (so do strobelights, flashing or otherwise), I spent most of the time grumbling to myself about all the stupid kids (within reason–people kept shoving around and attempting to start a mosh pit, I guess, and throwing things up on stage, like a single shoe, shirts, and…a red bra–the band members weren’t too sure what to do with that one), and I wore earplugs the whole time.

Yeah. Old woman. I know. But I want to be an old woman with good hearing. Also really loud music is painful and not so good for headaches, and it’s not like I couldn’t hear it–I could hear it fine, my ears are still ringing a bit now even so, 45 minutes later. Besides, not exactly a lot of nuances to pick up on in a rock concert.

Because I didn’t get this blog until recently, I’ll be talking about memories from earlier trips pretty much whenever I want to (read: whenever I can’t be bothered to think up something else). That’ll be a lot of Turkey, at least to begin with, since it was my first real bit of international travel and one of my more interesting destinations.

I might have mentioned that I loved Istanbul. I loved it for a lot of different reasons, but in large part I adored all the little ways in which it was foreign and strange—like, for instance, the fact that you can find vendors set up everywhere. I’m thinking specifically right now of pedestrian underpasses and bridges. These were pretty big, the underpasses feeling more like the entrance to a subway system rather than just a little tunnel under the street, and every single one was full of shops—people selling bikes and I don’t even know what else (I really don’t remember, the bikes were the only things that stand out in my memory). It was just sort of funny, I guess: people are so eager to sell their stuff that they’ll set up shop wherever there happens to be space.

(My other strong memory of such an underpass was watching some poor sod use a giant push-broom to sweep up the even more giant piles of trash, and my thought was, “Oh, so that’s how they deal with it…huh. Instead of, I don’t know, having more public trash cans or running major anti-littering campaigns…? Well, okay, sure.”)