10/28–Marseilles afternoon

Up the street a little ways is the Four Navettes bakery, the oldest bakery in Marseilles.  I really wanted to buy some cookies from the bakery, but at 17.50 Euros for a small bag, our frugalness took over.  Ed decided we could buy the bones in the Abbey cheaper than those cookies!  So, off we go…

..back around the old port, past the ferry launches (packed with people), underneath the cool Vieux Port pavilion, with it’s mind bending mirrored ceiling…

…past the seafood market with all the fresh catch out for display…

…Then on past the flower market and down the port promenade passing the Hotel de ville and getting messed up in the hundreds of people waiting for the tiny train and HoHo buses.  Yikes.

We cross over to the non-water side of the street and begin to peruse the menus of the different cafes lining the boulevard.  Ed really wants Bouillabaisse, but at 35 to 49 Euros per person—for lunch--that idea quickly goes out the window. We stop on the side of the road, peering intently at our maps, trying to figure out how to get to the Cathedral de la Major, when a French lady stops and asks us if she can help – actually she asks us if we speak French, English, Italian, German or Spanish—in each of those languages  What? Really?  Wow!  English please! And she proceeds to help us find the church in 5 minutes walk.  So sweet and lovely – it reminds us A) that we are just so lazy in America that we don’t learn different languages fluently, and B) we really need to be nicer to the tourists that descend upon Asheville when they are looking like deer in the headlights and can’t figure out their maps! 

We follow our sweet little lady’s instructions, and yes, in 5 minutes walking time we are at the cathedrale – another marble masterpiece.  Much more modern than the Notre Dame or Abbeye, this church was built in the very late 1800’s but still with a very Byzantine design. 

We’ve made our way through enough churches, cathedrals and Abbeyes at this point, and its now time to eat.  Searching for a decent place around here is not an easy task.  Wading through the reviews on TripAdvisor and Yelp are just too confusing and mostly not helpful.  We do manage to find one place that seems to have a good rep, and it is close to where we are at the cathedral.  What the heck – we’ll give it a shot.

Back to the Vieux Port we go, passing this awesome mural..

…and onto the patio at Paulette.  The menu is great, with lots of options and the ambience couldn’t be any better.  I order the Goat Cheese salad and am extraordinarily, and happily, surprised at the size – and the amount of bacon included (on the salad but not in the description!  You couldn’t have made a better salad than this for me though!).  Ed orders the mussels and stuffs himself silly with the huge and tasty portion.

The service is great and the cost surprisingly reasonable, considering the location.  After another round of beverages, we finally take our leave an waddle back toward the shuttle bus snapping pictures of the boats in the marina.

We decide to make one last beverage stop at Brasserie De Templiers – sitting outside on the corner, watching the world go by as we sip our wine and beer. Lovely!

Nice ending to a lovely day in and around Le Vieux Port Marseilles.

One last photo of Notre Dame from the ship (holy cow that was a hike)….

….and it is off to Barcelona we go.