After hours and hours of sitting long-faced at Newark Liberty and Lisbon airports, I finally arrived in Marseille. It was pretty much a rainy day in Marseille but thankfully the sun did show up a little bit when I got off the plane and show me a lovely pink sunset. Oh, but wait a minute! Why am I writing about Marseille while my destination is Aix? Well, here goes the story...
It was very typical of me that I didn't read the travel instruction again before booking the plane ticket and long story short, I arrived in Marseille 1 week earlier than I was supposed to. After hours of remorse (which means banging my head constantly on the... well, pillow), I decided if worst come to worse, I would just spend my time exploring Marseille with of course at the lowest cost possible. That leads to the one and only option: couchsurfing.
Basically, couchsurfing is a website that offers its users hospitality exchanges and social networking services (wikipedia). In more simple words, it's a website that helps you find a place to stay while you're traveling. I'd like to think that it's a community of backpackers around the world where traveling is not just an activity but an experience. It's where you open the doors to someone in order to have doors opened to you later on in your journey.
So, lucky me, I found not one but two hosts in Marseille and I spend time equally in their couches. It'd be a rather long story to talk about my hosts, so I'll save it for later and jump right back to Marseille - the European cultural capital. Sounds fascinating, doesn't it. However, Marseille's beauty doesn't really resonate at night. My first impression, already colored by a gloomy shade of fatigue, is mixed. An ancient city with a lot of graffiti (literally everywhere) is my very first idea of Marseille.
My very first day in France ended with a long and satisfactory sleep. I only woke up at 1pm on the next day and I got to travel a little bit that day. My host told me to visit La Cathédrale de la Garde, which I didn't until the day after. Instead, I got lost and found myself at Vieux Port (Old Port) - the city habor. This is when Marseille started to grow on me and fire up my journey in this city, which would begin on the next day.
It was very typical of me that I didn't read the travel instruction again before booking the plane ticket and long story short, I arrived in Marseille 1 week earlier than I was supposed to. After hours of remorse (which means banging my head constantly on the... well, pillow), I decided if worst come to worse, I would just spend my time exploring Marseille with of course at the lowest cost possible. That leads to the one and only option: couchsurfing.
Basically, couchsurfing is a website that offers its users hospitality exchanges and social networking services (wikipedia). In more simple words, it's a website that helps you find a place to stay while you're traveling. I'd like to think that it's a community of backpackers around the world where traveling is not just an activity but an experience. It's where you open the doors to someone in order to have doors opened to you later on in your journey.
So, lucky me, I found not one but two hosts in Marseille and I spend time equally in their couches. It'd be a rather long story to talk about my hosts, so I'll save it for later and jump right back to Marseille - the European cultural capital. Sounds fascinating, doesn't it. However, Marseille's beauty doesn't really resonate at night. My first impression, already colored by a gloomy shade of fatigue, is mixed. An ancient city with a lot of graffiti (literally everywhere) is my very first idea of Marseille.
My very first day in France ended with a long and satisfactory sleep. I only woke up at 1pm on the next day and I got to travel a little bit that day. My host told me to visit La Cathédrale de la Garde, which I didn't until the day after. Instead, I got lost and found myself at Vieux Port (Old Port) - the city habor. This is when Marseille started to grow on me and fire up my journey in this city, which would begin on the next day.