Bienvenus à Marseille

The flight from Singapore was full and crowded, mostly with Francophone Caucasians. It was however not at all very noisy. Europeans really appreciate quiet, Dad commented. The flight was uneventful, and we landed at Paris perfectly on time. The immigration official shot us his best skeptical look and tried to spot signs potential illegal immigration in us, but in the end decided to let us in after all. Speaking about immigration officials---the immigration counters at Charles-de-Gaulle discriminate not between French and non-French, but between European and other passports, courtesy of the Schengen Agreement. The Schengen area has been a reality for more than a decade, yet it still feels sobering to realise how countries which were at each other's throats less than a century ago can now treat each other's citizens as equals to their own.
The connecting flight to Marseille was delayed for almost 45 minutes due to maintenance work and then air-traffic congestion---four planes in front waiting to take-off, something that always seems to happen at this airport---but somehow arrived only 15 minutes late. Marseille-Provence airport was a very quiet place compared to Charles-de-Gaulle or Changi. The Airbus 319 that flew us there from Paris was the biggest plane we saw there. The shuttle from the airport to the city-centre train station was very smooth, and almost empty. Expensive too. Maybe that's because there are so few people to take it ...
Marseille was full of surprises. Or perhaps surprise is not really the right word to use, because on hindsight they were actually quite reasonable, and probably to be expected. Contrasts or differences might be a better word ...
There is hardly any English here, for one thing. Signages on the road and on public transportation are in French only; most restaurants only have menus in French; English-speakers are few and far in between.
There are also practically no Asian faces here. On the other hand, there are quite a lot of Arab and North African faces, the legacy of the French empire and recent immigration. On the streets and on the bus white faces do not form an overwhelming majority; it still feels like a diverse cosmopolis. But the fact that we are the only East Asian faces we have seen since Paris airport does make the place feel ... a little alien. Alien not necessarily carrying any connotations of anomie, but in the sense of us not belonging here, somehow. The romantic idealist in me likes to deny that discomfort due to racial differences is a natural human instinct; but maybe that belief is only tenable for someone who hasn't yet been in different-enough environments to experience such discomfort personally.
Unlike in Singapore, Sunday is really a day of rest here. Some boulangeries, chacuteries, patisseries and supermarchés were still open in the morning, but by afternoon virtually every shop in the city, less some eating establishments, had stopped operating. On the Rue de la République and the Rue de Rome, the main shopping streets, shuttered shopfronts were all there were to see.
Here we have HDB's. In Marseille ... there's Le Corbusier and his Cité Radieuse. It was like a haute-couture HDB block. Complete with void deck and characteristic corridor. But much more spacious, and with nice touches here and there, such as the red-yellow-blue colour scheme and the ship-like concrete embellishments. It was quite dilapidated though---although they are renovating the facades. The Hotel le Corbusier located in the building, where we stayed, had some fine touches but was generally quite lacking in attention to detail---the wardrobe doors didn't close very well, for example, there was no soap or shampoo provided, there was no telephone in the room or room directory, and so on ... still it was a nice and clean place, and waking up to see the Mediterranean spread out in front of us was a capital way to start the day.

For lunch we had bouillabaisse. It was very hearty. Very. There's one whole basket of fish in that bowl down there. Hardly fine cuisine, though.

After lunch, we ambled around the Vieux Port and then tried to visit the Musée Cantini. That's when we realised some of France's public workers were still on strike.

We wouldn't even have been able to tell if they just told us that the museum was closed because it was a Sunday, or because it was Pentecost.
Surprises notwithstanding, the change of scenery was very welcome. The Mediterranean here is as azure as it was in Beirut and elsewhere; indeed the Corniche John Kennedy, especially the stretches where they were no buildings to disrupt the view, and it was only you, the road and the blue, blue sea, was really rather reminiscent of Beirut's Corniche.

The area near the Cité Radieuse is full of insipid "modern" buildings but the Euromediterrannée buildings near Rue de la République were as stately and grand as Haussman's Paris, and Le Panier, though demolished by the Nazis in 1943, was still full of surprising alleys and unlikely corners, as though it had risen from the ashes in much the same spirit and form.

The day here is really long now ... the sun just set, at almost half past nine. Sunny Provence, indeed.