Where the White Things Are: Valentine's Day: from Marseille to Paris

On Friday, February 14th, we took the train from Marseille to Paris.

We checked out off our Airbnb at 10:04am (putting the keys back in the lock box attached to a bike rack around the corner) and rode the metro to the Marseille St. Charles Gare (train station). On my way through the barrier to get out of the metro station, the two barrier doors suddenly slid shut, giving me the truly French experience of being guillotined--it was a horizontal guillotine, but it was still totally a guillotine. Those doors slammed hard, one into each of my shoulders, and I had to really muscle my way out of them. It was made more difficult because I had my backpack on, so once I wriggled my shoulders out, my backpack got caught in the cross-chop. I even had a valid metro ticket and everything! Ridiculous! Hilarious! A sagittal guillotine chop in the metro. Hah!

We waited for a few hours at the Marseille Gare and then caught our train to Paris at 11:54am. Our train arrived at Gare de Lyon in Paris at 3-something PM, but check-in for our Airbnb wasn't until after 4:30pm. Since we had the extra time, we decided to walk the 2.5+ miles to our Airbnb. It was tiring carrying my backpack the whole way, even though I did pack very light. Jay and Rose seemed unfazed by a 2 mile walk with backpacks. Amber did get a bit tired and grumpy about halfway through, but we made it! On our walk from the Gare de Lyon to the Rue Turbigo, we passed La Place de la Bastille with a set of Olympic rings nearby. Our first Olympic rings! It was a famous feeling. We also walked through the beautiful symmetrical square of Place Des Vosges where both Victor Hugo the real life prolific author of fictional classics and Marinette Dupain-Cheng from the fictional Miraculous Ladybug cartoon lived.

Even after a 2 mile walk, we still arrived half an hour early at our Airbnb, so I took Jay and Rose to get some pastries for everyone at Bo & Mie, a patisserie we found a block and a half away. YUM. They were the best croissants I've ever had. So light and fluffy, with the perfect amount of butter so they melted in my mouth. It was my first ever raspberry croissant and loved it so much.

Eventually, sometime after 4:30pm, a guy came and checked us in to our Airbnb. These lodgings immediately ranked as some of the strangest we've ever had. We knew there were two bedrooms in a basement area, but it looked way weirder in real life! Haha. We had to walk through one bedroom to get to the other bedroom. There were zero windows in the basement, and with the thick stone walls and arched doorways, it felt very much like a crypt or a vault down there. And things kept going wrong for the first two hours we were there: the bottom stair in the basement was loose so we couldn't walk on it, and that made the railing loose and unusable too. The sliding closet door in the basement was completely stuck and wouldn't open at all. The shower drain was plugged up when Jay showered, requiring Jeff to use a toilet plunger on it. (Shudder--none of the debris that came out of the drain when he plunged it was from us.) Annnnd one of the bathroom sinks got plugged up too. Jeff got the shower to drain, but we couldn't get the sink unclogged, so we told the kids to just use the other sink instead.

[A few days later, we used the microwave in this Airbnb for the first time, and it shorted out the circuits for the whole main floor of the apartment! We didn't want to contact the Airbnb host and be forced to wait another couple hours for a repair person, so Jeff YouTubed European circuit breaker helps and after about half an hour figured out how to reset the circuit. The microwave was fried and unusable ever after, but at least the plugs and fridge worked again.]

We had to wait at the Airbnb for over an hour for the repairmen to come fix the basement stair and closet door. I was honestly pretty surprised that the host expected us to just SIT AROUND waiting inside the apartment at 6pm on a Friday night, which also happened to be Valentine's Day. Jeff took Jay and Rose to pick up kebabs for our dinner while I waited at the apartment and hoped that I could muster enough intelligible French if the repairman came before Jeff returned. Thankfully the repair guy was super late so Jeff was back by the time he arrived. Once the repairs were finally done, Jeff and I went to the grocery store around the corner to pick up breakfast supplies for the next morning.

After we brought the groceries home, we finally got to leave on our Valentine's Day date walk. It was nearly 8pm by that point, and we were so tired! It was a short walk. The city was busy! Cars jammed the streets and people filled the pedestrian areas. We left the loud car packed street to walk around the pedestrian-friendly Les Halles, but the clouds of marijuana smoke kept getting thicker and thicker, and Jeff started to feel his allergy act up. So we turned around and went back to our Airbnb for the night. Our walk was just barely one mile. A one mile Valentine date in Paris, cut short by secondhand smoke. Grr. Jeff took a Zyrtec and laid down while I worked on the clogged bathroom sink and reminded kids to brush their teeth. Even though it was not the most romantic of days, Valentine's Day was still more special in Paris than it would've been at home! Because we were in Paris, and we knew we would be in Paris for the entire next week! Delicious anticipation smoothed out the rough edges of the rough Friday night.

One last walk through the graffiti of Marseille, to the metro station.

The Marseille gare/train station is behind the downtown area, up high before the land slopes down to the water. Even though the metro took us straight into the train station, I made sure we went outside to admire the view when we arrived.

View from the Marseille Gare.

Inside the Marseille train station. Rose was surprised that there were real trees planted in the floor. I guess the stray birds in the station needed somewhere to sit!

Lunch on the train: I packed baguettes, carrots, Brie cheese (for the fam) and pate (for me).

I took one for the team on the train and sat next to the unwashed French guy with a nose ring while my family sat two by two across the aisle.

Heading off the train platform in Paris!

The flower shops of Paris were in full bloom on Valentine's Day. Extra charming.

The Olympics were here just a few short months ago!

Place de la Bastille.

Place des Vosges, where the buildings on all four sides of the square match perfectly and there's a darling park in the middle.

Place des Vosges

Heading out of Place des Vosges.

Rose liked the look of Le Centre Georges Pompidou: the famed modern art museum.

Our Airbnb was located on a narrow pedestrian only passage with gates that closed every evening. It was the quietest place I've ever stayed in a noisy downtown city!

Raspberry croissants! They had raspberry filling inside too! YUM.

Jeff, Jay, and Rose had pain au chocolat (croissant with chocolate inside). We ate pastries while waiting to check in to our Airbnb.

Our one week home in Paris: this was the main floor. Rose slept in a pull out bed on one couch, and Amber slept on the other couch (no pull out bed)

The kitchen.

The TINY toilet area. There was no sink in there, we had to wash hands in the kitchen around the corner after using the toilet.

The stairs down to the crypt--I mean basement bedrooms.

Jay slept in the first room, with the door to the bathroom on the right and the door to the other bedroom straight ahead. Jeff and I slept in that room.

The shower was kind of large by European standards. There was a washer AND dryer behind that green door. It was luxury to have a dryer. It was our first time ever seeing one in Europe.

Good news: I remembered to duck every time I went into the bathroom.

Mine and Jeff's crypt of a bedroom. It was SO DARK in there at night. No windows, hardly a breath of air. Thankfully there were air vents that ran all night so I didn't feel totally claustrophobic, but it was pretty scary in there the first few nights before I got used to it.