Marseille. Il Pleut.

So begins another adventure. This one starts in Marseille, France.

This is not the first time I’ve been to Marseille. It’s my second. According to the dates on my previous Marseille photos in Apple Photos, the first trip was in early November, 2010. It’s now early February, 2026. So if my arithmetic is correct, it’s been fifteen and a quarter years between visits.

I seem to remember quite enjoying Marseille the first time. That has a lot to do with why I came back.

One of the reasons for this trip was to escape winter in Toronto for a few weeks. I knew that it wouldn’t be particularly warm here. But climate data for the south of France at this time of year is for daytime highs generally between 10°C and 16°C, with the nighttime lows staying at least a few degrees above 0°C. (For those of you of the Fahrenheit persuasion, freezing in Celsius is 0°. So, 0°C = 32°F.)

That’s the expected climate. The temperature while I’m here looks to be taking its direction from the climate data. I arrived at my hotel a little after 3:00 p.m., settled in for a while, and then went for a walk. Before heading out, I checked the temperature to decide what layers to wear. It was 13°C. A light sweater over a thin long-sleeve shirt and a mid-weight jacket kept me quite thermally comfortable.

Out of curiosity, I looked at the temperature back home in Toronto. It was -7°C. That’s much colder than I enjoy, but not quite as cold as it had been in Toronto for the last couple of weeks. I don’t remember the temperature back home getting above -10°C for the last couple of weeks until today. And just over a week ago, we had a record single-day snowfall. A record for Toronto, that is. Other places get more snow.

This winter has been particularly brutal in Toronto. So getting away to a more thermally clement locale for three and a half weeks was a good decision on my part, I’d say.

If you have even just a souçon of French, you might have guessed from the title of this post, “Marseille. Il Pleut,” why I said “thermally clement” rather than simply “clement.” I don’t remember if that’s where I first learned what the French “Il pleut” means, but there was a time when, even in mostly anglophone Toronto, umbrellas emblazoned with the words “Merde. Il pleut.” were popular.

I haven’t seen many of them recently, but it was thanks to those umbrellas that I’ve been able to remember that “il pleut” is the French for “it’s raining.” “Merde” is French for … Well, never mind. I want English search engines to consider this journal to be family-rated. If you don’t know what the English translation of “merde” is, look it up. All I’ll say is that, no, it’s not the eff word.

By the way, apropos of *Joel makes a sweep of his arm to take in all of France*, a soupçon is all the French I have. I haven’t tried to count, so I might be grossly over- or under-estimating, but I probably know a hundred or so French words, not even including “merde,” but including “soupçon.” Those include some nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and articles. But my grammar is horrible enough that it would be reasonable to consider it non-existent. And if a francophone strings together just the words I do know into a conversation, I usually can’t pick enough of them out of the fast-flowing verbiage to pick up more than the general subject area of the conversation, if that.

Despite that, I know more French than I know of any other language other than English. So, I might not struggle linguistically here as I do in some other places, but still, I don’t expect to be able to have any conversations in the native tongue here other than asking, “Avez-vous une table pour une personne?” (Do you have a table for one?)

If the answer is anything other than “oui” or “non,” I might not know whether I’ll be able to eat there.

Wait. I got lost there. What was I talking about before I got into my embarrassing lack of fluency in one of my country’s two official languages, French?

Oh, yeah. Il pleut.

Before I set out for the airport in Toronto, I looked at the weather forecast for Marseille today. It was supposed to start raining at about the time my plane was scheduled to land and continue raining for a day and a half. Plus, there were supposed to be only a couple of days with any sun for the week I’m here before moving on to my next destination.

When my plane landed, it was heavily overcast, but not raining. After I retrieved my bag and left the terminal, it still wasn’t raining. While waiting for my Uber to fetch me and take me to my hotel, it started drizzling. It continued to sprinkle, drizzle, or rain off and on for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening.

When I looked at the forecast again after I arrived, it was still predicting a few days with at least some rain, and one day when it is supposed to rain all day, but the amount of rain had reduced since I first started checking the forecasts. Hopefully, that trend will continue into a pleasant reality.

Meandering in Marseille

My sole activity of note in Marseille today was to meander through the streets near my hotel for a couple of hours. I didn’t have any destination in mind. Nor did I try to find any information about any of the buildings I passed. I just wandered in a relatively small area.

One sight I did recognize right away was Marseille’s old port. It’s a long rectangle of water, much longer than it is wide, with one of the narrow ends open to the sea. A lot of boats, mostly small craft, including many sailboats, are in the old port.

There are also some larger tour boats, but based on the signage I saw, they seem to run tours only on weekends at this time of year. (Today is Monday.)

Marseille’s old port is ingeniously named “Vieux Port,*” which is French for Old Port.

My hotel is across the street from Vieux Port. However, most of the ground floor of the building facing Vieux Port is occupied by restaurants without entrances into the hotel. The hotel entrance and lobby are off the street on the other side of the building. My room also faces that street, not the port. Sigh.

The buildings on the three sides of Vieux Port range up to maybe eight stories. They appear very French, and mostly oldish, without being ancient. Then again, I’m awful at recognizing building styles and ages.

Most of the streets behind and to the two sides of my hotel have buildings that appear to me to be roughly of the same vintage as the buildings around Vieux Port. And, again, most of them are mid-rises.

There are some larger, impressive buildings that look as though they have major landmark status. But, as I said, I didn’t do any research today, so I have no more to say about them.

The area of Marseille that I walked through has a few pedestrianized shopping streets paved entirely with paving stones of some sort. Some other streets have only one narrow lane for vehicles. Despite cars being allowed on them, few ventured there when I walked along them. And pedestrians encroached on the whole street as a matter of course.

I didn’t do much today, but the occasional light rain notwithstanding, I liked what I saw.

* Note: “Vieux Port” on its own is generally written that way in most places I saw it, but if the French translation of “of Marseille,” “de Marseille” is tacked onto it, there’s usually a hyphen. I.e., “Vieux-Port de Marseille.” However, I’ve found some inconsistencies in that usage. The Marseille Tourism Office webpage for Vieux Port always hyphenates it, even when it stands on its own.