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Marseille, France
Continuing on our tour for today our bus took us to the lovely town of Aix, pronounced simply as X. If only all French pronunciations were that easy. We were dropped off at a dramatic Apple Store located on a traffic circle that had a huge fountain at the center. The Apple Store was one of their glass cube stores…quite a statement in an ancient town where almost every building was made out of the same golden colored stone taken from a nearby quarry.
We walked around town looking for lampshades for our Carmel house but we were sadly disappointed not to find anything even close. We decided to go to a modern art museum populated with one Van Gogh, a number of Picasso’s and other artists that a man named John Planck had collected for a wealthy local man over the years. It was a nice exhibition that had been constructed from a cathedral. And, it was free and had great free restrooms.
That’s one thing you quickly learn about in these parts. The public restrooms, er, water closets (WC for short) are few and far between and almost all have a person manning (usually a woman actually) them and sort of demand a 1/2 Euro tip. Better solution? Buy a coffee from a cafe and use their usually clean restrooms for free. And, some are pretty interesting tours in and of themselves.
We walked around town a bit more and then settled into a street-side cafe (with free WC) with another accidental couple from the ship and had several rose’s and latte’s before walking the block to the Apple store and boarding the bus.
The bus ride back was about 30 minutes. We then had drinks at the Observation Lounge at the top-front of the ship where we requested our fresh grapefruit juice to make our Pink Flower drinks. We met a friendly chap named Chet and had a fun time hearing about his life and his beautiful wife named Mary Ann. We then went to a late dinner at the Signatures restaurant and made it to bed at around 11 pm…unfortunately we noticed that Margaret’s voice was starting to get hoarse. Signs of things to come.
