Marseille and Avignon Weekend

Sorry I have fallen so far behind in posting. The weekend in Marseille was awesome. Emily and I left on thursday night and arrived in Marseille early morning on Friday. When we arrived we went to the hostel with a "24-hour reception" which was closed. So we walked along the water for quite a long time. We went back to the hostel around 11 and they were open this time. They were very nice explaining that they had just finished renovations on the whole hostel at 3AM and since our train was late figured we weren't showing up until later and went back to bed. We rested at the hostel until my good friend, who is interning near Lyon, France this summer, met us at the hostel. After that we went down to the Vieux Port which has been a bustling port since the Greek empire. There is a vieux fort to go along with the vieux port and we got to go up into the fort and check it out. There was an amazing church on the top of a hill in Marseille but since we were feeling a little cheesy we took a little gas powered "train" (a gas powered tourist trap) up to the top for a couple euros each. We saw the church and got to ride the train with 50 obnoxious teenagers who were chanting something in French that we couldn't quite understand (despite all three of us speaking good french). That night we went out to dinner at a really cool tapas place that was suggested by the owners of the hostel. This hostel, by the way, was the coolest place we were all weekend. The staff was soooo friendly, they all spoke GREAT english and even helped us learn some new french and practice it. They also called the tapas bar to let them know that a couple of americans were coming over! After that we were exhausted so we just went off to bed. The next day we took a boat out to an island off the coast, about a 20 minute ride and spent the morning and early afternoon eating some mussels, walking along the beach and exploring the island. This trip had a lot of interesting experiences involved with it. The first was the first beach we found had about 5 or 6 dead birds washed up on the shore, we assume it was due to the high winds but we couldn't be sure. The next was my brilliant idea to pick up a piece of cactus. I carefully procured this piece of cactus from the ground, being careful to avoid the thorns, well the whole thing was covered in thorns so my hand became covered in thorns which Emily and Travis thought was hilarious. It was rather painful though. That night we went to a wine bar where we had some pretty good food and great wine.
The next morning we walked around Marseille for awhile until Travis had to catch his train and Emily and I went off to the beach. We spent the afternoon at the beach until it was time to head off to Avignon.
I finally had my dream come true on the train to Avignon, we got to ride a TGV (train a grand vitesse: train of high speed) which really was fast, on our "slow train" the time from avignon to marseille was about 1.5 hours, the TGV did it in 30 minutes. It was sooo smooth and comfortable. Our hostel in Avignon was nice and the first evening we were so tired from Marseille we grabbed some food and went off to bed. The next day we got up early and went to the Palais de Papes (palace of the popes) which is where the French popes lived for several hundred years during the church's more troubled times. It was spectacular how they managed to spend all of their papal money, mostly gold things or wars. After palais des papes we checked out the next door church and the walled part of the city, this pretty much covered everything in the city. At this point it was around 4 and our train didn't leave until midnight so we did what all smart people do in this situation, go to a movie, in french, without subtitles. We saw pirates of the Carribean 3 which was good but despite our impeccable french skills, I think we still missed a few things. After the movie it was dinner and then off to the train station where we played cards and chatted to other people from the Tech program before we got on our train back to Metz.