Welcome to a late and probably fairly summarised blog post on my Easter weekend, which I spent in the South of France (how exotic and cultured does that sound?!). As we only got one day of holiday for Easter, we were left with two choices:
- stay in Rennes and lament the lack of excessive amounts of chocolate and our families (but mostly the chocolate)
- make the most of our 4 day weekend to do some travelling and actually use our sunglasses
As you can probably tell from the title, we went for the second one (imagine how boring this blog would be if we'd gone for the first one...'so we stayed in Rennes and cried into our Lindt bunnies. The end.'). This post will be a lot less detailed than some of my others because we were there for 4 days, and if I wrote down absolutely everything you'd still be reading in 2020. So, on with the anecdotes and photos!
As our flight on Friday morning from Nantes was at some unearthly hour we got the train there on Thursday evening. We had pizza and stayed in a fairly basic hotel with the worst wifi ever, but it was cheap and even included an interesting bottle of shampoo/conditioner/shower gel in one. The only exciting thing that happened on our outward journey occurred when we were chatting to the taxi driver on the way to the airport: he was asking us what we were doing here/where we were from, and HE ASKED IF WE WERE FRENCH. Life. Made.
We arrived in Marseille exhausted and hungry, so collapsed in a Colombus café (best muffins in France, and they even do chai lattes) next to the window looking out over the old port.
 |
| Thankyou for saving us from exhaustion Colombus |
 |
| Le Vieux Port |
As a way to both see the city yet remain sitting down for as much as possible, we got the tourist train (or the 'wally trolley' as the cynical Ellie called it) up to Notre-Dame de la Garde, a church on top of a hill with amazing views over the city. It seemed very appropriate that we were there on Good Friday!
 |
| View of Notre-Dame from the city |
 |
| View of the city from Notre-Dame (see what I did there) |
 |
| The church up close |
 |
| Inside the main building |
The rest of the day consisted of some of the best fish I've ever had for lunch, probably caught and bought by the restaurant from the fishermen that morning, then going back to our hotel and sleeping, going to Carrefour to stock up our fridge and having pasta whilst watching Netflix. Our hotel room was amazing: really not too expensive and we had a fridge and a sink and a hob to store food and cook some basic dinners, which saved us loads of money in the end!
 |
| Eating fresh seafood right by the port...we could smell the sea! |
 |
| Domestic goddesses |
Saturday was the day we had set aside to visit Aix-en-Provence: Ellie had been there before on an exchange and said it was beautiful, and she has a housemate studying there so we even had a tour guide to show us round! The weather was absolutely beautiful, and I totally fell in love with Aix. It's such a gorgeous, very typically Southern town: lots of beautiful buildings, winding streets and open squares, lovely shops and nice restaurants. And of course the glorious sunshine, that helped a lot too. We spent the day wandering the streets and looking round all the shops, having lunch and ice-cream, going to a museum and sitting in the park.
 |
| Fontaine de la Rotonde |
 |
| A typical street in Aix |
 |
| A band creating that French ambiance |
 |
| The Saturday morning Marché des Fleurs |
 |
| Cafés on the high street |
 |
| Parc Jourdan |
OH, and I found an English bookshop with a 'blind date with a book' corner, a Jane Austen shelf, and a teashop...it was like air to a drowning sailor, seriously. I was beyond excited.
 |
| I spent ages trying to guess what books these were |
 |
| I would happily have spent all day here |
Day 3 was Easter Sunday, and after a fairly lazy morning we headed out into Marseille to hit the tourist spots we had yet to see. Marseille itself is - in my opinion - pretty grim as a city: the tourist bits like the port are lovely, but there aren't huge numbers of places like that and the other bits are all fairly rough. Having said that, we had a really nice afternoon looking round the old fort which now houses the MuCEM museum, along with an edgy new building with great views over the sea. We queued for ages to see pretty much the only open exhibit only to discover the queues was still miles long, so we gave up.
 |
| The port side of the museum |
 |
| In the courtyard |
 |
| Views out to the sea on the other side |
 |
| The edgy building |
Finally, we went to La Vieille Charité (a domed chapel surrounded by Roman-looking galleries)...
 |
| The inside of the dome |
 |
| This must be in a film somewhere, surely |
...and the Marseille version of the Arc de Triomphe, which was a lot less impressive than its Parisian counterpart.
 |
| Stupid roadworks ruining my aesthetic |
The next day we just packed up our hotel room and spent a couple of hours chilling in the port before our flight, and then spent the next 8 hours or so travelling by metro, bus, plane, shuttle bus, train and finally another metro before arriving back in Rennes.
 |
| Final photo opportunity |
And that was our weekend! Overall although I think going to Marseille for a day or so to go round the port and the tourist areas is a good idea, I wasn't really that impressed by the rest of the city. Aix-en-Provence on the other hand is now one of my favourite places in France and would be a perfect holiday destination, especially as it's not far from other towns like Toulon, Montpellier, Cannes and Nice, and just generally so pretty and French. Would recommend.
No comments:
Post a Comment