A little bit of Marseille
2002 06 05
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When I was sixteen years-old I went to visit my mother in France for the first time. For the first three of the fives weeks it was just the two of us - her husband was still in Senegal finishing up some business for the company he was working for at the time - and it was just fabby.
Since she didn't have a license, we spent most of our time in Marseille just tooling around the city. I think one of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen was the Friday morning flower market in the downtown area - one side of the long main street was nothing but flowers from one end to the other. Gorgeous seems too plain a word for it, but sublime is a bit much, so let's just say it was both and somewhere in the middle.
We did a lot of visiting of friends of hers - including one family who had a son about age 20 who loved Simple Minds and was absolutely the most gorgeous thing I'd ever seen in my life (up until that time, at least). My poor little teenage heart had a crush on him for months afterwards. Another one of her friends was the person who got me liking pine tree seeds. She served them with what was possibly the best roast of beef I've ever had in my life. Mmm.
The apartment building where my mother and her husband own the apartment in Marseille, is not an apartment building at all really - it's a 200 year-old house that at one time belonged to the Hugarian ambassador to France. It's a bloody gorgeous place that faces the Mediterranean. I could, if I wanted, be out the door and in the ocean in less than five minutes. Watching the sunset over the Mediterranean is one of the most beautiful experiences you could imagine.
Anyhow, the apartment building is a co-op - which is great in one sense, but not when it comes to having the facade of the building redone due to sea-salt and Mistral damage, because one of the current tenants is a real bitch. Doesn't want to have to pay for anything, but is the first to complain about anything that's wrong. I digress...
The tenants had a big dinner in the back patio one day - more or less a combination of tenant meeting and "welcome the Canadian kid". The table was lovely, right down to the name cards on the plates. That's the one and only time I've ever been to a dinner that had name cards. Mine said "Fille de Canada", because they couldn't remember my name apparently, so they referred to me as the "daughter of Canada". The company, for the most part, was quite nice - even though I couldn't understand but maybe twenty words out of the mish-mash of French that was floating around my ears. None of them spoke English at all, though a few did try a little.
It's funny how language barriers don't disguise certain things, though. You don't need language to tell you what kind of person someone is - not when their body language and tone of voice are doing all the work. That, coupled with the fact that I'm not an idiot, was enough to tell me that Madame Beirot's (I can't remember the precise spelling) boyfriend (who coughs like a frigging lunatic all night - trust me on this one, you could hear it through the walls) was a grobian * of most annoying demeanour. I don't know where the hell it was coming from, but this guy was one of the most patronising louts I've ever met. Perhaps it was my age, or the fact he's a jackass, but I could tell (despite the French) that he was being a shit. I mentioned it to my mother later on in the evening, and she confirmed. She wondered how I could tell. I just could.
The oddest thing about the whole trip was getting used to topless women on the beach. After a while you just don't notice it anymore, but it does take some getting used to. It's hard, though, to sit down at a beach cafe table and not feel a little awkward talking to someone that you'd just seen bouncing around half-naked on the sand.
* grobian [n] - A rude or clownish person; boor; lout