Marseille

As planned, I spent Saturday in Marseille, even though the weather forecast called for rain in the afternoon. In the end, it only rained lightly a few times during the day, but was gray and overcast the whole time.

From Aix, the direct bus to Marseille only took about 20 minutes and, with the Cartreize, only cost €1 each way. The bus drops you off fairly close to the Vieux Port, the port that's been Marseille's center for 2600 years. We walked around the port up to the Fort St-Jean and Cathedrale de la Major on one side before looking for lunch. People in Aix keep telling me that Marseille has better pizza than Italy, and while I don't know if I'd go that far, it was certainly good—and cheaper than pizza in Aix. A whole royale pizza was just €6.20 in a small restaurant in Marseille, but would be more like €9 here.

Anyway, the streets around the port are busy and bustling, with an eclectic mix of tiny markets and food stalls, expensive name-brand stores, and all sorts of oddities in between. La Canebiere is a big, wide street leading away from the port and it's filled with restaurants, banks, and so on.
On the other side of the port is Fort St-Nicholas, another centuries-old fort that used to protect Marseille. As with the other fort, not much is left, but from it you get great views of the port and the islands off the coast of Marseille. From the fort, we carried on south to the La Corniche, which runs right along the edge of the Mediterranean. From there, you can see even more clearly the islands near Marseille. One is home to the Château d'If, which was intended to serve as a fortress but became a prison. It's also the setting for Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo.

From La Corniche we took a winding, narrow road uphill inland toward Notre Dame de la Garde, the cathedral that overlooks Marseille. As the Eiffel Tower is a symbol of Paris, Notre Dame is a sort of symbol for Marseille; pictures and articles about the town almost always include the church, due to its prominence.

The hill that the church sits atop is over 500 feet tall and made of limestone. And yes, climbing that hill is harder than it looks. At the top of the belfry is a giant, gold-plated statue of the Virgin Mary—it's giant, and somehow as shiny as if it was in a museum.

On the way down the hill from Notre Dame is an American tank left over from the liberation during World War II. Three French soldiers were using it to attack the Germans, who had occupied Notre Dame, when the tank was hit by grenades and the soldiers were killed. Now the tank is a monument to the 1944 battle to liberate Marseille from the Nazis.
From the top of the hill you also get great views of all of Marseille, which let me realize just how big a city it is. After walking around for almost the whole day, we barely saw any of the city, and I'll definitely need to return in order to see other parts of the town.