10 days in Marseille part three (day 4 and 5)

InFiNitY[pG]

Germany3474 Posts

September 22 2008 11:58 GMT

Day 4:

Sunday was one of the coolest and also the worst day, I'll get to it later.
While looking for a beach on saturday we passed a nice beach at Marseille Harbor, which we decided to go to on Sunday.
We parked our cars at a steep road, got our stuff and went down to the beach.
The weather was perfect and the beach was also very nice
(ignore my ugly asian friend in the front :O )

our day consisted mostly of doing this:

or playing water rugby with the girls, which was pretty hardcore, since they decided to bite, tickle and scratch in order to get the ball, and they usually ganged up 3 on 1 :O

Later that day we played on the beach with something like this

which is kinda played like volleyball in a circle.
A french guy around our age watched us and we invited him in.
I decided to practice my french and got to know the guy a little, asking him where to go out and stuff. He was pretty cool, he spent the day at the beach with his buddys doing capoeira.
There was also a street fest going on that weekend, which was very close to said beach, so we had planned to go there from the beach and grab a bite, before returning to our house.
Unfortunately, when we got back to our cars, we saw that one of the rear windows of our van had been smashed in.
As I had mentioned, Marseille is known as the most criminal city in France, and here we got a taste of that.
Our friend's pda/GPS had been stolen along with his GF's bag, which fortunately only contained some clothes.
The thieves had left the keys to our house in the van. In retrospect, it was pretty stupid to leave that stuff in the van, but it could've been easily stolen from the beach as well, so I guess it was just misfortunate.
The worst thing about this was the broken window, so we decided to try and get it fixed as soon as possible and get hammered in the evening to try and not let it ruin our vacation, which obviously wasn't that easy, since we were all pretty bummed after that incident.
We drove home and asked our landlandy for help, she told us where to find a repair shop and also offered us to park the van in a secured parking lot over night, which was a big relief. After dinner it was already around 9 pm, it was sunday, and we had no booze left except two bottles of wine.
So we drove out and found a gas station that was still open.
We bought 2 bottles of martini, around 15 beers and some lemonade to mix the martini with, for 50 bucks.
Back home we played taught the girls "Durak" (russian for fool), which is a very fast-paced, action-packed russian card game, and one of the coolest card games i know. The basic concept is that two players "attack" the player inbetween them with cards, which the defender has to "beat" by putting higher cards of the same symbol on top of the attackers cards. If he can defend all attacks, the cards on the table are thrown away and it's his turn to attack. However, if the attackers put a card that the defender cannot beat, he has to pick up all the cards on the table and cannot attack this round. This goes on until there is only one player left with cards in his hands, who will be named the Fool, and has to deal next round and is also the first to defend in the next round.
Here are the exact rules, if you like card games, go check it out, you won't regret it.
We tried to get drunk, but for some reason none of us really felt the alcohol that night, so we called it quits at around 1 am and went to bed.

day 5:
We got the car from the secured parking lot and saw that our land lady had taped a foil over the vans' broken window earlier in the morning. as a little 'thank you' for all her help, we bought her a bottle of wine on the day of our departure.
We spent the day mostly trying to get the rear window fixed, driving around Marseille and checking out at lest 5 repair shops, none of which were able to fix it before our vacation ended...
So we would have to be very careful on the last days and also drive 12 hours home with a broken window, great.
Anyways, later that day, around 5 pm, we took the metro to the plage de prado, the beach we spent day one at.
However, this time we were prepared with lots of beer and the plan to spend the evening there, watching the sunset and swim at night.
It was the coolest evening of the vacation for sure, we all got pretty drunk on our 60 beers and 3 bottles of wine and jumped into the sea at around midnight. It was freezing cold, but the alcohol helped with that. My perfect plan to run right in to get it over with as quickly as possible was an epic fail, as my legs didn't work too well anymore and I smashed my head on the ground about 3 feet into the water. Fortunately it was only sand and noone saw it, so I was okay after a few seconds of dizzyness.
Apparently I was not drunk enough, as I went back to the beach first, freezing my ass off.
We left at around 1.30 am, walking for 20 minutes back to the metro station, getting a ticket for 8 bucks, just to see the last metro of the night leave right in front of our eyes. So after another 30 minutes of walking we were finally back home, and fell into a deep exhausted sleep.