Marseille without Bars, American without Tears

So first this was supposed to be a European trip, focusing on the Arctic, with a side trip to Africa. Then it became a Mali trip, with a side trip to Norway. Then it became something else altogether. Why the interest so far north? Well, I’ve got an obsession with the Arctic, and I’m considering writing a travel book on it, so I gotta’ see it in the depth of winter, too, just to know what it’s like. It’s not exactly like I’m chasing the Chukchis in Siberia or anything like that. The west coast of Norway, and Iceland, are the greatest temperature anomalies in the world, with the possible exception of Lima, Peru. The temperature there, right at the Arctic Circle, in the dead of winter, is about the same as Flagstaff, Arizona, cold but tolerable, and much much darker. That’s what I needed to see. That’s the definition of ‘otherworldly’ for me, watching the sun rim the horizon, a few degrees above being summer, a few degrees below being winter. Phenomena like this can give real empirical clues that the old sun gods driving chariots across the sky were a little weirder then the ancients imagined. In reality, however, explaining the actions of Venus’ was probably the bigger clue. Even as late as Marco Polo’s era, readers were astounded that he didn’t fall off down there rounding SE Asia. Columbus read carefully. Anyway, that still doesn’t mean I want to do my big Norway adventure in darkness, so when I got the good Iceland Air rate to Europe with stopover included, that was an easy fix. It’s hard to pack for the Arctic and Africa at the same time, though, so I’m not really prepared for cold and wetness. I tend to put about as many miles on my shoes as my Dad put miles on the tires of his Gremlin, so they’re about falling apart by now. If the sky gets cloudy, my feet start getting wet just out of habit.

So it turned out to be something of a European trip after all. That’s the nice thing about multiple flight segments rather than one long round-trip from Arizona to Africa. Not only can you save money, and get stopovers, but you can cancel out partially and still salvage the trip. Actually, even losing half my Air France flight and buying the one-way on Iberia, I probably still came out cheaper than round-trip Arizona-Africa. Air France just laughed when I suggested that some consideration for a ‘medical emergency’ would be nice, since I’d taken the trouble to cancel my return and all. Maybe I’ll get the frequent-flyer miles anyway. But Europe’s still nice, even with the new weaker ‘bushy’ dollar. It’s hard not to like a place that names its main cities after sausages and mystery meats, e.g. Frankfurt, Hamburg, Vienna, etc. Budget airlines are proliferating like Thai food restaurants, threatening the old state-subsidized flag-carriers and giving real options for budget travel. The only problem is that you miss the scenery in between. This is ominous in an era when the real social and economic gaps in the world are between urban and rural. Our brothers and sister in the outback are in danger of being forgotten. This is especially dangerous in poorer countries that are heavily centralized. Fortunately most of our north European heritage is less like that, probably why it took them so long to show up in the history books. This is the good thing about Internet and advance telecommunications. It allows civilization’s greatest accomplishments to accommodate, and exist in communion with, Nature.

So life starts to take on a certain regularity after a few days, wherever you go. That’s not tourism; that’s traveling. Marseille is no different. I walk down the main thoroughfare of La Canebiere, named for its historical hemp, every day as if it were my own. It always looks different at night. I try to avoid getting hit by the streetcars that are so quiet they sneak right up on you. ‘Desire’ was noisier than that I believe, all clanging and clattering and keeping me awake at night. I check the price of avocadoes every day out of habit, dumbfounded at prices that vary from one to three dollars a pound. There are no wi-fi cafes here, but that doesn’t matter, since I can usually steal a signal from the fancier hotel next door. I check my e-mail and see how work is going for the Dengue Fever concert I’m promoting. I check to see if I’ve got any export business. I check to see if I’ve got the rejection notice for my novel yet. I send out this little message in a bottle as if I somehow know it’ll come back to me with interest paid, in love if not money. I’ve even been reading my junk mail, something I rarely do. I still don’t check to see how Amber1967 looks at 40; that’s a little too spammy for me. I’ve stopped working out every morning to avoid antagonizing my longsuffering kidneys, but that’s probably not a bad idea anyway in a place where showers cost five Euros a pop. I take a long walk or two a day instead, trying to discover new neighborhoods. I stick post-it notes on my laptop as if it were my office. I maintain an intravenous (coffee) drip, so that I won’t fall asleep at my keyboard and wake up to find myself in the Matrix. I’ve learned to eat Nutrella, which I’ve long noticed imported to Thailand, but never given a fair trial. It’s not bad, on bread for breakfast or whenever, even makes a decent cup of hot chocolate.

French TV is all backwards, though, ‘Days of Our Lives’ on at 9am and the good science documentaries on after midnight, but that’s OK. I’m just trying to understand the French. They’ve got Hannah Montana of course, Billy Ray’s achy breaky daughter. ‘Hunter’ re-runs still play here. That’s weird, but not as weird as ‘Alf’ reruns playing in Peru. At least Hunter’s a person. I’m not sure what time the flab-&-abs exercise ads come on. I try to keep up with the Clinton-Obama match-up. According to French TV, les Americains sont fatiguees’ de Bush. Tired of Bush? That’s an understatement. According to another columnist, Obama is the cowboy hero riding in to save the day and secure the happy ending for America and the rest of the world. Maybe they’re right, but I’d take whichever candidate can beat the oil mongers. The French liked Jerry Lewis after all. I go change money, since my hotel takes no plastic and the ATM’s are a rip-off internationally now. They even changed my West African CFA francs, not surprising here in Little Africa I guess, so that’s cool. I’m so blissfully bored I’ve even considered shaving my beard, which I started on the long train ride in Mali, then became attached to. Don’t tell my wife. It’s nice to be able to be bored anywhere in the world. It’s like home, not some border-town curio market with over-zealous salesmen hustling and hassling and drawing lines in the sand between us. I walk the red-light district after dark, listening to the cooing and purring of tired old service workers who probably got too old for Pigalle and came to work the provinces. They’re trying to get all romantic calling out from sleazy bars in dirty alleys. It doesn’t work that way. The desire for youth and beauty are hard-wired into our urges for merges like footnotes to an evolutionary dead end, sacrosanct and inviolable even when we’re just going through the motions. Almost anybody would rather go to Amsterdam and see young filles from anywhere and everywhere ready to get all Germanic for a lot less. Me, I’m just looking for halibut. Boredom can be dangerous.

I feel like Nitiphoom Naowarat, the guy on Thai TV, who travels around the world to check the prices of rice on the shelf and to see if they’re from Thailand. He interviews Thai people around the world as if they were really Chinese who just… don’t go there. He’ll go anywhere that hates America or globalization, so that he can join in the demonstration, donning the local garb and banging a drum. He even got his Ph.D. from Moscow University, but long after the USSR had folded. It’s easy to be Communist when it’s all over. He came in first in the elections for Senator in 2006. He even helped stir up sentiment against Thaksin, so that’s cool. He was doing just fine until a phone conversation was leaked to the Internet of him in a dispute over a half million dollar debt in a five million dollar business deal gone sour. I guess he doesn’t look so revolutionary anymore. But mostly he travels to interesting places, and then does nothing. I like that. What are you supposed to do anyway once bar-hopping is a thing of the past? You find pleasure elsewhere. I’ve seen hepatitis-C friends go through this for years, and now it’s my turn. I may never go back, even when the kidneys are healthier. The thrill of intoxication has slipped a notch or two over the years, thank God. The bars don’t represent a prison so much as a waste of time. There’s only one vice left; fortunately the ulamas OK’d it long ago for halal consumption. I’ll have a double macchiato, espresso with a head of steamed milk. It’s the drug of choice.

If Tails Toulouse I Won’t; If Heads Marseille I Will

So I left Barcelona in the middle of the night. The rains had already started by then. I thought maybe I’d get lucky and ride out of it, but no such luck. By the time I got to Marseille, it was worse, God taking a dump on us, rain falling in sheets and wind blowing up a storm. We pulled in at six in the morning, I oblivious to most of the trip, though somewhere we changed drivers, probably at the Spain/France border. If Customs or immigration did anything, I’m not aware of it. They did upon arrival at the bus station in Marseille, running a sniffing-dog through the bus, regardless of the fact that people have already gotten off en route. The French police like to make a show of things, especially in Paris at the terminus of the route from Amsterdam. France is not sympathetic to any loosening of recreational drug laws. Alcohol is the drug of choice by tradition. You just don’t smoke joints by candle light and whisper “Je t’aime” in a breathy swoon. I guess it’s just not romantic. I don’t know why not. They don’t have any problem doing the same with cigarettes. I read today that France is the last country in Western Europe to outlaw smoking in public places. Four years ago the thought that any of them could do that was unthinkable. Ireland was the first, believe it or not, they of pub culture exported world-wide. So now cigarette smokers seek out open doorways in the train station like wi-fi scum looking for a signal. When they find them, they stand right in them, as though an open door were not a passage but an invitation to congregate. This was a conceptual problem already that smokers have co-opted for themselves.

Marseille has some of the cheapest rooms I’ve seen in a developed country in a long time, unheard-of prices like fifteen, twenty, and twenty-five dollars a night. Every room seems to have its own particular price, I guess based on square footage. That doesn’t mean they’ll have a shower, though, and if they do, you might have to pay extra for it. Thus the reputation of Frenchmen is confirmed by the system. We all knew they seem to carry a heavier bacterial load than most Westerners, we just didn’t know why. In France bathing is optional. Smells from laboratories sell well. When the first cheap hotel I inquired about told me there were no showers, I thought she meant there were no showers in the room, i.e. down the hall. She meant none, period. The rooms have sinks, though, so I guess you can take a whore’s bath, whatever that is, in addition to whatever else a guy might do with a sink, considering the crapper’s down the hall. I could use some help here, not being French, so I’ve considered offering a whore money to let me watch her bathe, but I don’t know if she’d do it. It’s probably too kinky. Those rooms don’t even have an electrical outlet, much less TV, or curtains on the window. Now if there’s something scarier than the fact that there are thousands of Frenchmen walking the streets in various stages of un-wash, which we already knew, it’s that they might be giving themselves a mop-job and whatever else over a sink by an open window while God and the whole world looks on. Better leave the kids home on that European vacation.

In North America rooms this cheap would have long been overrun by junkies or closed by order of the local government. Junkies don’t need showers either. That’s the way it is in Vancouver, BC, Canada. You can smell them coming. Apparently half our genes are devoted to smell. Now you know why. That leaves room for a lot of creativity in Evolution by the way. But the junkies in Van City don’t care about that; they have another concern. They also have their own district between the upscale part of Gastown and Chinatown. They roost like vultures, gravitating to the sunlight and surveying the terrain for easy pickings. Zoologists probably go there to study their feeding and mating habits, if they still have any. Marseille just has winos, good old fashioned bums begging coins for booze. I don’t know where they sleep, probably on the street. The cheapest hotels close their doors at ten, eleven or midnight latest. That’ll keep the riffraff out. This is a part of Europe scarcely known or acknowledged anymore, the old Europe, mostly southern and eastern, of poverty and degeneracy and petty crime, far from the tourists and modern development, wherever unemployment is rife and competition for scarce resources is fierce. A tourist concentrating on these areas could see Europe almost as cheap as anywhere in the world, certainly as cheap, or cheaper, than West Africa. This includes much of Portugal, southernmost Spain, southern France west of the Riviera and Italy from Naples south, in addition to most of the East European countries. Conversely the New Europe of budget airlines and capitalistic fervor hasn’t even scratched the surface here yet. There is no bus to Paris and the cheapest one-hour flight is four hundred bucks. So I’ll take the TGV. There’s no choice. International buses have cheap rates and traverse the country, but they don’t serve local routes. Welcome to France. Enter Sarkozy.

So I opted to go a half-notch upscale. For forty bucks and change net, I get some old European style with rough beams in the ceiling (including fake adze marks), a large bed, six stations of French TV, a sink, and… a bidet. I’ve got a bidet in my room, but no bath. Crapper and shower are down the hall, five euros to bathe. While I contemplate the ceiling beam right over the bidet and the multiple uses to which a nylon rain poncho might be put, I remember the scene in Tropic of Cancer (or was it Capricorn?) where Henry Miller’s American friend used the bidet to lighten his intestinal load to the chagrin of… well, everybody, but especially… the whores taking their whore’s bath. Now I’m getting the picture. Hey, I want my five Euros back! Even funnier was my architecture professor at Jackson State trying to explain the concept to the down home bloods who’d probably used outhouses during childhood. When he could get a word out at all between stifling his grins and muffling his guffaws, he called them ‘bidgets.’ I’d read Henry Miller so I knew what he was talking about, despite the bad French, but the rest of the class was lost. So we shared a bond there, derriere la scene, united in our imaginary knowledge of the ways of the world, while the peasants wallowed in their ignorance.

Marseille is a fast food paradise. That’s good considering that sit-down meals would be about the same price as the cheap rooms. I’m in the shawarma part of town, little Africa. If you want bouillabaisse, then that’s another quarter. Moroccans here seem right at home, sipping mint tea in sidewalk cafes, while their wives stay at home and do all the work, just like good little Tangerines back home, ‘the other TJ’. There are Asians here, but they seem fairly Frenchified, offering lunch specials with wine. The Vietnamese restaurants don’t even have pho’, the national dish, good old rice-noodle soup. Pizza is ubiquitous, and good. Kebabs and frites line every corner. The bakeries are to die for, of course. Me, I try to limit myself to fast food no more than once per day, not because of restaurant fatigue, but high carbs and boredom. So I cook noodles in my room and make sandwiches to order. The space between my window and the outside shutters makes a fine fridge, thank you. They have a combination cranberry/mango juice here, so all is right with the world. Kidney stones are in remission and I’m taking the TGV to Paris Sunday. I’ve got a wi-fi signal in my room, just by accident. Plan C just might salvage this trip yet. I’ve had visions of Marseilles for a long time. I don’t want to sound spooky like I had a premonition or something, because after all, I could’ve gone to Toulouse, but I think I always thought Marseille might be a part of France I’d like. It’s hard to learn the language of a place you don’t really like, after all. For me to enjoy a place is to internalize it, know it’s insides until I feel like a local. What cathedral? What statue? Show me the produce section.