Marseille!

Hello everyone!

We're now safe and sound in Marseille. We're staying at the Hotel Vertigo, which is a really artsy hostel about a ten minute walk (more than ten minutes if you get horribly lost, as we discovered earlier today) from the Vieux-Port, which is a bustling inlet packed full of ships and surrounded by shops and restaurants. There wasn't much to see down there today, unfortunately, as many places were closed due to it being Sunday.

The plane ride over was a really stressful experience. After being harassed for a while by Air Canada in Toronto (because the Winnipeg AC people didn't give us the proper documents for our extra checked bags), our Toronto-Heathrow flight ended up being delayed because the flight crew showed up to the airport an hour late, due to the snow. This resulted in us missing our connecting flight in London. They put us on the very next flight to Marseille, which was seven hours later. Needless to say I got a lot of reading done yesterday. Apparently seven hours wasn't quite enough for them to figure out our baggage, so I'm still missing one of my bags.

Anyways. We breezed through customs in the airport and then caught a 25-minute shuttle to Station St. Charles, Marseille's central train station. We found our hostel really quickly right after asking a security guard toting a massive German Shepherd for directions (today, we found our way back to the hostel after asking for directions from a different guard with an even bigger dog). By the time we got to the hostel it was around 9:30 pm, and we went right to bed.

We ended up sleeping well into the afternoon today, and only ventured out for a little while to explore the Vieux-Port and get a bite to eat. Tomorrow we're hoping to find a market and stock up on food, as well as heading over to the train station to figure out the train schedule to Avignon.

Till later,
-Brock