Marseilles - City of Stairs

Oh my goodness.  Any of you who are working out on the stairmaster just need to move to Marseilles.  Stairs in the metro station, stairs in the hostel, stairs up to the church on the top of the hill, stairs from the docks ... just stairs everywhere.  The ones to the top of the hill above the city where Notre Dame de la Garda is were the worst.  It seemed as if they would never end.  The church is incredible, totally worth the climb... or if you'd rather take the bus you do have that option as well... I just didn't want to figure out the bus schedule.  I do recommend having good knees if you're going to climb all those stairs... I don't have good knees, so it was interesting to say the least.  But as my sister said, makes the butt look good!

We only spent one day in Marseilles - so we spent 2 nights there.  It was a nice city, pretty easy to get around and yes, I found Edmond Dantes - he was a boat, but I found him!  We found a pretty decent place for food and the waiters there were very nice, even though we do not speak French.  And no, it was not a French restaurant because those were pretty expensive... we ended up at an Italian place and shared the pizza there.  The most awesome thing?  Instead of giving us crushed red pepper like they do back home, they give you a bottle of olive oil with little whole red peppers in it.  So you just put the oil over the pizza and wa lah - spicy goodness on the pizza.  Heaven!  The more I listened to French, though, the more I thought it would be nice to learn it.  I thought the announcer on the train was trying to seduce me until I realized that's just the way French sounds.  Before I left, one of my friends used to text me in French and I can assure you, it looks just as good as it sounds.  I'll most likely try to learn German, though - I have a friend who is German and it would be kind of fun to talk to her in her language instead of me being lazy and always using mine.  One thing about it, being an English speaker means that I can be a whole lot more lazy than I have any right to be!

So we spent our day in Marseilles climbing stairs, then trying to avoid stairs... we failed, but that's ok.  We survived.  And I was kind of pathetically happy when a French guy smiled at me... at least, he could be French... a really tan French... anyway, he was CUTE!  And he smiled at me... so yay!  Our first experience with the French was a good one.  We then went on to see about experiencing Italians... but that's for another post!  :)