Conference excursion – to the Calanques!

The past week the lab I’m working at here in Marseille hosted ECEM (European Conference on Eye Movements), a four and a half day extravaganza of conferring and going on amazing outings in Provence. Way back in June when I’d first arrived, I volunteered my English-speaking services and so this week ended up working at the registration desk and various other coordinating jobs from about 10 am until the end of the evening’s entertainment, which – at the absolute earliest – finished 11 hours later.

Perks, however, were abundant, as compensation for hours of cognitively-demanding language-switching in the sun. There was an event every night and, being French, these guys sure knew how to throw parties. Sunday night we had an aperatif (read: heavy hors d’oeuvres and copious quantities of wine) after the opening address. Monday night was a wine tasting and buffet on the grounds of a chateau and vineyard in Trets, a village in the countryside 45 minutes outside of Marseille. Tuesday was another aperatif/barbecue at school.

Wednesday, though, was the most exciting day, when talks broke early for excursions; I was one of two tour guides for a 3 hour boat trip around the Calanques. The conference had hired a private boat which took us out from Vieux Port and through the gorges between the sheer Calanque cliffs on either side. After shepherding the conference attendees down to the Port and onto the boat, Kim and I got invited up to the upper level where the captain was, so we could do the tourist narration of the trip. We were given a book of awkwardly-translated paragraphs about the surrounding Calanques, and as we went past a particular area, the driver (boater?) would give us an involved explanation of what we were passing and we’d translate however much we felt like into the mike for everyone to hear. The view from the upper deck was fantastic – it was a semi-enclosed cabin with a tiny outdoor deck on either side, affording excellent views, unobstructed by the conference goers in steerage down below.

On the way back as we were approaching the harbor, the boat guys put on some rock/techno/dance music in the cabin, and I got them to put a mike up to the speaker to pipe it through the whole boat and everyone danced along. They even let me drive the boat (which had a legit pirate ship-type steering wheel) for a good chunk of the way back home. (Though only after asking if I had a driver’s [of a car] license.) The trip was really amazing; being out on the sea, surrounded by gorgeous scenery, with the sun overhead (as it so often is here in Provence) and the wind whooshing past and just boats and cliffs and water all around.

Wednesday night, immediately after the excursions, was the gala dinner, held atop Marseille’s Fort St. Nicholas, overlooking the harbor, in the starlight. Lots of wine (until it ran out), limited vegetarian food, and after a couple of hours, a DJ and a very inviting dance floor, which led to some rather epic dancing by a bunch of very enthusiastic scientists. Definitely the best conference I’ve ever attended in terms of events (sample size thus far: 2).

A sampling of pictures below (click on them to make them bigger), and (most of) the rest of the pictures I took on the official ECEM photo website:
https://picasaweb.google.com/117260803759574680086/CalanquesBoatTrip

New Friends

One of the things I love about Marseille is that everyone will talk to me. This is not true in Paris, San Diego, Providence, Boston, or any of the parts of the greater New York metro area with which I am familiar. And I don’t mean talking in terms of responding to a question or grudgingly giving directions. I mean completely willing to drop everything and start an involved conversation. Of course, I can only speak from my own perspective – that of  a young, female French speaker with enough of an accent to be clearly foreign (and thus, apparently, interesting). Even so, it’s amazing who will start to talk to me, and what they’ll start to talk about. Security guards at the library strike up a conversation about smuggling in chocolates during (and after) the 4-second check of my bag at the entrance. Patrons at an outdoor book market discuss World War II, or how Prometheus was a great guy and thus anyone male is just like him. (As a side note, I’m pretty sure that the guy trying to talk to me about the war was aphasic. He wasn’t so good at forming complete sentences, and he’d say pierre (stone) about three times per phrase, obviously as a placeholder for something else. And he would laugh in an exceptionally hearty but put-upon manner whenever he seemed unable to find the right word.)

Today, as I was walking home, a garbage truck pulled up alongside me, emptying the bins along the street. Marseille has these giant, cubic recycling receptacles with tiny holes at the top to put in your goods, but no visible openable cover to allow the contents to be dumped into the truck. (Note: there’s one bin for glass, and one for everything else – I’ve chosen to interpret this as testament to the vast quantity of wine the French drink, such that they produce so much more glass recycling than anything else.) Tonight, I was watching the truck as it went by, hoping to see how they got the bins open. One of the garbage men saw me standing and staring on the side of the road, and asked me what was up. I asked him the question about the bin door (turns out it’s on the bottom: they use a crane to haul the bin into the air over the truck and then open the door to dump the recycling in) and he answered during the 30 seconds it took the other garbage man to pick up the trash at the spot where we were. Time to go, right? ‘Course not. Completely unconcerned about the fact that the other back-of-the-truck-hanger was already hanging and the driver was getting ready to move again, as well as the fact that several cars were sitting behind the garbage truck, honking their horns profusely because they couldn’t pass on the exactly-one-car-wide street, my new friend proceeds to strike up a chat and ask me what country I’m from, and then what part of the country, and is still talking to me as he tries to climb onto the tiny perch where the other hanger is already positioned and the truck drives off down the street.

This behavior is extremely typical, and was actually something that I came to miss when I moved to San Diego after a year of such overt and forthright friendliness. Lines get held up in bakeries because the person behind the counter is deeply involved in recounting or hearing the story of what went on during vacation when everyone was away. Waiters don’t bring the bill, or the machine to run your credit card, or bread, or the menus, because they’ve begun an animated discussion with the newest patrons who’ve wandered in. Coffee-drinkers sitting in the seats along the street at outdoor cafés ask passers-by how they’re doing and whether they’d like to join them. It’s just incredible, especially in a country so stereotypically anti-social, to be bombarded with such outgoingness and everyone wanting to be my friend. Makes me feel so damn popular!

Ramadan in Marseille

As my friend Andrew astutely pointed out, Ramadan began a few days ago. This explains the sudden uptick in frenzy and sweet-selling at the markets in Noailles, the heavily-concentrated Arab section of Marseille. One fasts until sundown, which happens here at about 9:30 during the summer. But in addition to all the regular fruit/vegetable/olive/nut/fig/bean/battery/watch/cigarette stands that are open every day, everyone had a table full of heaping trays of honey-saturated pastries. What was interesting was that they were out already at 6:30 or so, when I was walking home from work, and thus long before sundown.

Every little store had one of these stands selling several different types of incredibly sticky, honey-covered snacks.

Dates and figs by the kilo.

I went around taking pictures, all for you, dear readers, and at first I tried to sneak around and be as surreptitious with the camera as possible. It helped that there was tons of activity on all sides, so enough people were always not looking at me that I could walk around relatively unremarkably. But after a while, standing around staring right at vendors while taking their pictures gets them to look up, so the incognito approach didn’t work for too long. What was amazing, though, is that they’d invariably be absolutely thrilled to have their picture taken. A bunch of people asked me where I was from – I said I was an American student – and everyone I talked to was more than happy to pose and make it into the annals of American photography. The guy below even gave me a piece of the cake-thing he was dishing out as a thanks for taking his picture: it had the consistency of extraordinarily granular and sticky cornbread, and tasted as though it were made entirely of honey with a token almond stuck on the top.

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See those black things? They're not chocolate chips...

Whenever I walk around Noailles (which is often, because it’s the best place to buy produce, is right near my apartment, and always has something interesting to see), there’s this tiny voice in my head that chants on repeat, “If only they knew you were American and Jewish…” Some days I look more American than others; not sure if I ever look particularly Jewish. I do unconsciously check that my star necklace is under my shirt, though, or turned around so it’s in the back and so under my hair. Honestly, it’s probably not necessary, if the American sentiment here (and in the city in general) is any indication: I have never once gotten an anti-American response, and only rarely even gotten neural, as opposed to positive, ones. People here really do seem quite accepting, especially when you’re friendly and speak French and are happy to talk. So I really do wonder about the Jewish thing and whether it would be at all an issue. The habit of hiding my star comes from my first month here the first time around, when I went to Rosh Hashana services and got adopted by a Jewish yente, who told me the city was quite anti-Semitic and so to be aware. I think (hope?) her view was perhaps a hold-over from shortly post-war times. In any case, Marseille is segregated in the sense that there are definitely distinct neighborhoods but I’ve not experienced any outright on-the-street racial conflicts.

Marseille lunchtime

Marseille is a city which, inexplicably, does not do siestas. It’s certainly Mediterranean and it certainly gets warm and sleepy around midday in the summer, but there seems to be no sanctioned recourse. Starting at noon, people descend upon the bakeries and cafés en masse to provide for their lunches. This swell lasts for an hour or so, during which time there seems to be no one in the entire place not delicately ripping into a baguette. By about one, however, a blanket has been dropped over the city and everything is muted. The streets, while not empty, have large swaths of person-free sidewalk in a city center normally full of elbowing and ambling pedestrians. Many stores of a certain type close for two or three hours and those that don’t proudly tout this fact: “ouvert sans interruption”. The sun gets louder (though maybe it’s just a contrast effect arising from the quieter people). It’s the perfect environment to eat your lunch in the shade of the university courtyard, unroll your hammock, and drowse off for an afternoon nap.

But returning to the inexplicable, I don’t know of a single siesta-taking Marseille resident. I know people who go home for lunch, but then come back to the lab far to quickly to have effectively napped. I know, far too well, people who have sleepily tried to muddle through the mid-afternoon mush in an article-reading, experiment-designing, and data-analyzing haze only to be faced with the societal pressure to not sleep at one’s desk. It is so incredibly beautiful here in the evenings and at night – the air has a crisp, lavender [color, not flower] feel to it, and everyone on the the streets is full of happiness and energy. I’d so much rather be active and awake and outside at midnight than at noon.

Academia – noted for being one of the most temporally flexible disciplines – ought to implement a sanctioned nap culture. (Fellow UCSD grads – help me spread the desire!) But especially in a place like this, where the ceramic-tiled rooftops, slanting in no uniform direction, exude a soporific monotony while baking in the sun – here, there are truly times when there would be nothing better in all the world than to be not (consciously) experiencing Marseille for a little while, and just close my eyes and sleep.