travel can be fun

well i have been away from the blog for a while. mostly because of travel and the
vagaries of phone -line connections.

but here's one travel story:

so one fine day last month i set out from marseille to la ciotat a lovely town on the
mediterranean (the first movie was made and shown there by the lumiere brothers-but
that's another story).

the fastest way to get there is by train so i took the metro from my hotel to the train station.
when i got to the metro stop for the train station i and several other passengers found that the entry way to the train station was shuttered and locked. we asked a metro employee who was satnding there but he simply shrugged and said try the main entrance around the corner--
so off we went around the corner to the main entrance (did i mention that around the corner meant shlepping luggage up three flights of stairs and by the way the temperature over 90?).

we get to the plaza at the top of the stairs (which by the way has a magnificent view of marseille if you can see it through the stinging sweat which makes you squint your eyes not to speak of the bright sun which is in your eyes) and find a very large crowd milling about surrounded by rather heavilly armed police--what's going on i ask .

well it seems that there has been a bomb threat --and they're checking into it.
oyyy--i think a moment :

a--it's very hot there with no shade

b-if there is a bomb do i want to be hanging around that spot.

c--why not take a bus

now the main bus station is just around the block (did i mention that it means shlepping the luggage down the same stairs).

i go around the block to the bus station and wait on a long line to get a ticket. 1 ticket to la ciotat
i say---ah la ciotat the guy says,
buses to la ciotat go from the other bus station.

what other bus station i say.

oh don't you know for your convenience there's a separate bus station for all southern destinations it's just a few metro stops away.

so i take the metro to the stop for the other bus station and when i get out there's no bus station to be seen.
i ask at a local bistro and the guy tells me just around the corner there's a ticket office.
ok
i go around the corner and find that the ticket office is closed (did i say it was sunday).

but it does list buses for la ciotat but there's no indication of where the %^&% the buses stop.
this is an area where many streets are criss-crossing in all the cardinal and not so cardinal directions.

so i go back to the bistro--the guy says he has no idea but the bus for cassis (which is a town close to la ciotat stops just accross the street and the bus is sitting there).

AHA-- so i shlepp accross the street and it turns out that the bus for la ciotat is run by a different bus company--the driver tells me to ask at the ticket office (the one that is closed).
i'm a bit tired of all this but i don't give up.

i go to the newstand (i love it that they still have newstands in europe a convenience long lost in almost all us cities). the guy has no idea BUT a young woman there says oh yes the bus for la ciotat stops down the hill and around the corner.

by this time it's starting to rain---it's hot and wet. i go down the now water-logged hill and find a guy sitting at a bus stop filling out the racing form and when i ask he says --yeah he's waiting for the bus to la ciotat--VICTORY! ----but it've just missed the last bus and we have to wait an hour.
noooo problem i feel very accomplished.

other people arrive and then a group of plaintive chinese arrive begging if any one knows how to speak english.
i do them one better --i speak to them in chinese--it turns out they have been wandering around for a looong time trying to find where the bus for cassis stops. they have been directed to several stops where they waited and found that the bus doesn't stop there.

that's one thing i do know--so quite authoritatively i direct them to the cassis bus stop.

the crowd around me is quite impressed---one woman compliments me and several others say nice things about me . i feel quite virtuous and then the woman asks where i am from ---america i say.
she looks at me and says the americans are doing terrible things in iraq and looks at me as if i personally had started the war. i say some negative things about the war but useful discourse has come to an end.

anyway the bus comes and when i get on the driver says one euro (instead of 5)-- is that all i say--it's the fare for seniors he replies. so much for how i look.

we get to la ciotat and after an interminable walk to my hotel which turns out to be muuuuuch farther from the bus stop than it seemed on the map (i hate these overview maps which have no scale and leave out minor streets)---did i say it was in the 90's.

so finally i get to my meeting in la ciotat and run into someone who got there from marseille.

so how did you get here i ask.

oh, i took the train.

but what about the bomb scare ?

oh is that what it was---i don't speak french so i just waited and five minutes later they let everyone into the station--the train got here very fast---how did you get here?