Where the olive trees grow...

The air of Villette was healthy, as expected, and the planned trip to Marseille was finally possible :)


So I can make mark on the wall, I have touched the Mediterranean Sea! It is funny, but as I had not been in the south of Europe before traveling to Argentina, there are many things that resemble Argentina for me. Tells something about how the human mind works...

The Provence version of fjords, Calanques de Cassis, just next to town, was a real herb garden. It is kind of no wonder that in these corners of the world people have traditionally used more herbs in food than in the north, when rosemary, thyme and lavendel are growing all over the place, wild. Dry, but still green, cliffs, which look quite wild. Moi, je aime bien.

Ei äiti, en mennyt uimaan ;)



We also visited downtown Marseille, on a Sunday, so it was "quiet". It still looks strange to me to see the metal curtains in front of closed shops - as strange as it must be to think that there are countries where people do not steal to the extent that it would be necessary. For me it just makes the streets seem very unwelcoming and the story they tell is scary.. But there were nice small streets, a whole lot of boats and interesting-looking fish sold at the harbour ;)



We happened to go in the church (the largest Notre Dame of Marseille, on a hill looking over the town) exactly when there was a mass going on. What else to expect on a Sunday... A catholic mass was also something I have not seen before (not that it was so very different)... The little boats on the ceiling are still the same as in the small wooden coastal churches in Finland, even if the church is quite different...

I did not remeber that the "prison of the count of Monte Christo" was here - but I saw it from ashore :)
But most facinated I was about the plants - most of them are familiar to me from botanical garden of Helsinki, herb gardens or just from the "Vegetation of the Earth" course, so it was not owerhelmingly much new but actually possible to look at them - in their real environment :)


I went beyond the limits of my knowledge of french by trying explain the concept of semi-domesticated reindeer, theme of my Phd-thesis and Norwegian nature to Jaquelines cousins family. But people were very friendly and made an effort so we could communicate - I just have to win all kind of embarrassment of language spoken wrong ;) (Which is probably healthy.) Had I made a trip to Marseille alone, it had been a little expedition. Now it was a family visit with a little walk. Foodwise there is a major difference in exploring a supermarket downtown Grenoble and visiting a bakers family :) It is quite different from Tromsø-barbecue in March in snow to sit in (green, not snowy) garden, drinking pastis for aperitif... But the concepts are not so far apart, just in different circumstances. People might speak differently (and with a order of magnitude more hand movements), eat and drink slightly differently - but a big family dinner is finally very similar.