Marseille
OH HEY! Remember how I used to have a blog? Well, recently I actually deleted this blog in a fit of anger (so many of my life decisions are made this way) but I didn't delete it forever! I am BACK and have so many lovely photos to share with you, as well as some updates on my life: I finished my MA, moved back home to Louisiana, and am now on the job hunt. I had been so busy with the end of year exhibition, fitting in last minute London activities, and packing up all my junk that I kind of fell off the face of the earth, but I have returned for good. First, I have these amazing pics from my trip to Marseille last year, which I thought were appropriate because my friend and I took this trip as a reward for finishing a year of studying and to get away from the cold, wet London weather for a bit. Also, you will now know the truth behind my love affair with madeleines! Read on for dazzling Côte d'Azur snaps and of course, historical happenings!
Hi. This is Marseille. Marseille is a sea port on the southeast coast of France on the Mediterranean, which is known as the Côte d'Azur (Azure Coast), because the water is so blue and gorgeous it actually is insulting. WE GET IT, FRANCE. You are marvelous at lots of things. Anyway, Marseille has been an active seaport since the 6th century AD, and as such has a history of being a little sketch. But in 2013 the city got the European City of Culture Award and has been polished to a high sheen, although any port or high-traffic city like this one is bound to have some unsavory cargo moving through it. My friend Brittany and I watched The Connection before the trip, which is all about how dangerous Marseille was in the 1970s because of the MOUNTAINS of heroin moving through the city. Remember that movie The French Connection with Gene Hackman? Yeah, that movie was no joke. Most of the heroin in Europe was going through here, and you know everyone was down in the 70s. We were super scared after seeing the movie but it's all good now, I mean, most cities were super sketch in the 70s, am I right? Well, anyway, there were OLD BUILDINGS galore:
Marseille was incredible. We went to a huge fortress-museum and I took lots of sweeping panorama pictures of the Mediterranean and all the sand-colored architecture. It was pretty hot outside and we were gently baking on all the terraces, but it was worth it to catch all the BLUES!
Also, Marseille is full of actual history and literary history, too. Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo is set in Marseille, and the main character spends almost 20 years at the island-prison Chateau d'If. THIS IS A REAL PLACE. There is actually a fortress/prison on an island off the coast of Marseille that If was based on. Unlike the book, the island is pretty close by, so if you pulled a Dantes and snuck out of the prison in a body bag that was meant for your friend, and ended up getting thrown over the cliff into the ocean when you thought you were getting buried, and you ended up getting out of the chains and swimming to the surface, you wouldn't have far to go to be in the middle of town instead of washed up on an island with some badass new pirate friends that will let you join their gang. Are you following? Also, if you haven't seen the movie they made about ten or so years ago with Jim Caviezel and Guy Pierce, you are missing out on a wonderful life. France! Revenge! Stately homes! Sneering aristocrats! NAPOLEON! It has everything you could want. Including a VERY VERY FRENCH town hall.
We really lucked out on where we stayed. Our Airbnb was across from the Opera, and we could hear the singers practicing during the day and hear performances at night. Right around the corner was this LIFE-CHANGING bakery called Boulangerie Aixoise that served the best madeleines on the face of this earth. They were dipped in chocolate, super thick, and I wanted to die every time I had one. Madeleines are shaped like little boats but they do no taste like boats. They taste like all of your hopes and dreams. We went back to this bakery almost every day and I could have lived inside of it. They also served these little anchovy pizza-tarts (lots of Franco-Italian mashups going on) that were crammed with garlic and tasted outrageous.
Next up, to keep with the Mediterranean/end-of-term theme, my trip to SARDINIA!
Canterbury Cathedral
This is a special ghost edition of Eve Loves Things: Canterbury Cathedral! This way for 100% real ghosts and ghost photographs which are in no way a result of a smudge on my camera lens.
My friend had finished her MA and was heading back to the States, so we decided to go on one last day trip to Canterbury. It was full of old things and old creepy ghost feelings, as you can see in the 100% authentic ghost photography which is, I repeat, not a drop of water that landed on my lens when it was raining.
So much scrolling! Listen, Canterbury in incredible. I've seen a lot of gothic cathedrals, but this one was so huge and impressive it was terrifying. Because the crypt is above ground, the cathedral has several floors in the centre, and because they don't get any light it feels outrageously dark and spooky, which if you ask me is half the point. Granted, the point of many gothic churches was to fill them with light by using so many windows and light-coloured stone, but also I think it adds to the whole life and death vibe of a Christianity that communicated more through imagery than text. When you had lots of illiterate churchgoers, you had to remind them what's what by putting gargoyles and stuff on your already horrifyingly large church-tomb.
Also, Canterbury is actually for REAL haunted with important Christian ghosts. Thomas Beckett was the archbishop of Canterbury and was having a tiff with king Henry II about the churches' rights. The king sent some soldiers to the cathedral and they cut Thomas' head off where he was kneeling to pray, which is a pretty cheap shot. After that he became a huge Christian martyr and saint, and tons of people made pilgrimages to Canterbury to see his relics and hope that some of their voodoo magic rubbed off on them, cause you do NOT mess around with relic-magic.
Anyhoo, remember when you had to read The Canterbury Tales in high school English and probably regretted your entire life? They were written about people coming to the Cathedral to hang out with the crypt of Thomas Beckett. People came to the cathedral for hundreds of years, until Henry VIII destroyed Beckett's shrine when he was generally pillaging all the Catholic churches in England, because he was a JERK. I mean, take their money if you want, but leave the super old crypt for posterity at least!
I have to say, my favorite part of any medieval cathedral is the cloisters. I'm fairly sure I was a monk/nun in a former life because when I walk around cloisters I feel like I belong there. This also happens in libraries, which is where you spend most of your time if you're a fancy monk copying manuscripts. And I would have been the fanciest monk, dammit. Or actually, the apothecary monk, because you were basically a witch, and I think I was also a witch.
Coming back to reality, the cloisters were gorgeous and the sun was very polite and came out when we were walking in them. The grass was VERY GREEN, and I think you aren't allowed to walk on it to preserve the greenness. The cloisters must have been hard place to live but also a relatively safe one, since the church more or less protected you and fed you and such, although I can't imagine things were champagne and caviar unless you were the archbishop and you probably ignored most of the rules about humility and poverty and just threw DOWN at monk parties whenever you had the chance. At least that's what I am led to believe after reading The Name of the Rose, which I definitely recommend if you like reading murder mysteries, stories about monastic life, and if you don't mind having obscure mystical text titles in Latin thrown in your general direction whilst you read.
University of Cambridge
I just went for the cheese scones at Fitzbillies.
In September I went to a musical instrument conference at the University of Cambridge. The conference was hilarious because it was partly organised by the Institute of Acoustics, and apparently a lot of the academics researching and writing about instruments are physicists and astronomers because they know about sound bouncing around in a conical shape and such. Half of the presentations were lots of math equations up on a Powerpoint slide and I was a little terrified, but there were also some insane 3D scanning and renderings going on.
Now, there are two things I think about when I think of Cambridge. The first is my friend Denys, who studied abroad there for a year and who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts while she was at MIT. The second is Brideshead Revisited, or else every other kinds of early 20th century novel about sad privileged white boys being super sad because, you know, sleeping on a bed made of money is uncomfortable at times. Of course, now Cambridge is more than simply a posh boys' club; women can go to Cambridge now and it's full of super smart, terrifying geniuses like my friend. But lots of things stayed the same and the whole place is very weirdly historic. The river is a big thing, and there are lots of flat boats you can rent (they call it punting) to pretend you are in Bridget Jones reciting Keats while drinking a Diet Coke. Or so I assume. Anyway, the river and its surrounding bits were really pretty and picturesque, and there were cows everywhere to complete the whole countryside motif.
The most medieval part (I think) is King's College Chapel, which has all the important components of high medieval architecture and what everyone on house-shopping shows on HGTV is looking for: high ceilings, lots of natural light, CHARACTER, and tons of storage. This chapel in particular has really amazing spindly ceiling bits that fan out like a plant. There's also some SERIOUS stained glass going on in there. The glass looks amazing when it's sunny out, and the whole place looks very bright and airy because the stone is light in color and the whole place is basically a glass box, whereas cathedrals are sometimes darker from their shape and exterior things blocking light (or dirty old stonework).
Another friend who went to Cambridge for undergrad was explaining all the rituals and traditions and such and I got a little overwhelmed, but she said that you sit in your College in the chapel, thus the awesome members only plaque above. She also directed me to Fitzbillies, the cafe in the first picture, where they serve cheese scones. I went back to that place way more times than I should have in three days, but I have no regrets about those delicious damn scones.
I really enjoyed wandering around Cambridge because it had plenty of funky old parts like alleyways and ancient pubs and such. It was nice too because I came right before all the new undergrads would get there, so it was pretty peaceful and I didn't get run over by a swarm of cyclists like I thought I might. I was really into the whole medieval thing. In fact, I met someone at the conference who showed me around Peterhouse, the oldest College at Cambridge with a dining hall that was supposedly the oldest building in England still used for its original purpose. SO MANY MEDIEVAL GOINGS ON!
And there will be even more medieval goings on in my next post: Canterbury Cathedral!
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