st charles station terrace
Step outside the station and you have a wonderful view of Marseille, but why no seats? Seems SNCF doesn’t want anyone sitting down or perhaps sleeping on the seats….Frustrated? well guess who does provide seating? Macdonalds!
You can sit here without buying a big mac, anything, and what’s more Macdonalds has WIFI! My eticket is rejected! however, help was quickly at hand, but I must remember to take extra time when I’m using an e ticket. I’m now on my way to the TVG to Nice….I’m sorry to go. Marseille is a city of harsh edges and handsome houses, a turbulent history, needs far more exploration. I only brushed the surface of the North African culture but its rhythms are what makes Marseille so pleasantly languid…can’t count on anything being right on time, i’m told, you either accept it, or move on…i’d hoped to taste a fusion of Pieds Noirs food and French food, but I never did. I see Daniel Boulud’s New York resto Boulud Sud has more fusion than Marseille….
.I never worked out where exactly Julia Child spent her year at the Vieux Port, but as this photograph from the book As Always Julia shows, her kitchen overlooked the harbour from the Rive Gauche, look at the old fishing boats. Today, the harbour is dominated by yachts and sailboats. From the pic, I have the impression that the new luxury apartments beside the town hall were just being built. Then, as Julia recounts, Marseille was pretty seedy, but today, the city fathers have made a huge effort to take the city beyond its old rep as a mafia hub for drug trafficking. .
The train winds along much of the coast, we’re going to leave the harsh beauty of Provence for the Cote d’Azur, the playground of the rich and super rich, discovered by the anglosphere in the l9th century…..You can see from this map that there are only little peeks of the towns and beaches from the train..
For example, I can’t see St. Tropez at all, or Le Levandou where my parents had a villa in the thirties, an inheritance from a great uncle who lived in Nice…..Today, St Tropez is overrun with tourists but then it was just a great beach town for Le Suntan, something Americans made fashionable. Odd to think that eighty years ago, the coast had lots of undiscovered delights but then there were only 2 billion people in the world and only a tiny minority were able to travel…My parents were crazy for aioli and returned to Oxfordshire determined to show off their cooking prowess. Dead silence greeted the aioli. Garlic was a taste too far for the neighbours. After that debacle, my parents shelved the idea of cooking bouillabaisse…..southern cooking wouldn’t really arrive in London until after world war II…
The railroad catches up with the sea again at St. Raphael, a glimpse of a beach…red rocks 
and on to Cannes, a big city, with a big city jostle then to St. Juan Les Pins and Antibes, once simple little towns, Antibes of course is a literary/artistic shrine to the memory of the Gerald Murphys, the rich Americans who made this part of the Riviera a sandy salon where Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway the Scott Fitzgeralds mingled with Picasso and Leger. The beach they patronized was La Garoupe but you can’t see it from the train…. Now Antibes station looks a bit bleak, even suburban… Finally Nice, a nice little station…
.right in the middle of town,doesn’t take long to get to my hotel The Ellington, yes, named for the Duke….which is full of Chinese tourists…But it’s only four blocks from the Promenade des Anglais, two blocks from the beautiful place massena.
