MARSEILLE – Revisited…Somebody who thinks like me, but cooks way better……….

” Before dinner, we took a walk along the cobblestoned edge of the Vieux Port.  The air was brisk and breezy, and the harbor was redolent of sewage and decaying fish.  There were mobs of sailors, soldiers, Arabs, gamins, whores, pickpockets, shopkeepers, tourists, and citizens of every shape and size, all moiling and shouting.

About half the men looked like they’d modeled themselves on Hollywood movie gangsters, and their gals looked like gun molls.  The honking cars, bellowing trucks, and whining motorbikes created bedlam.

C&C in Marseille (Photo credit: Chris_Carter_)

The streets and gutters were cluttered with garbage.  Masses of it.  We decided this must be a legacy of the medieval habit of tossing refuse out the window.  Along the quay, dozens of wooden fishing boats were parked, stern in, and wizened old men and enormous fishwives sold the day’s catch from little stalls or sometimes right from the back of their boats.  Moving deliberately, the dark-skinned crew of a two-masted schooner from Palma de Mallorca were unloading crates of bright-orange tangerines.

Marseille’s hot noise was so different from Paris’s cool sophistication.  To many of our northern-French friends it was terra incognito: they had never been here, and considered it a rough, rude, “southern” place.  But it struck me as a rich broth of vigorous, emotional, uninhibited Life- a veritable  BOUILLABAISSE OF A CITY”

Julia Child,   Marseille  1953

“My Life In France”      

Cover of My Life in France

Actually, it’s pretty much the same – not much different 59 years later!   🙂

(Garbage now in neat green plastic bags though)

But the wind….

the MISTRAL….

Oh, how it blows

stuff around!!!

Marti