Day 2

June 28, 2013

We started off our second day by sleeping in a bit. We were woken up by a maintenance man who came by to fix our lights. He reset the fuse in our room, changed a light bulb and all was well.

The grocery store had been closed after dinner the previous night, so Molly and I went grocery shopping once again so she could get some lunch food. Shopping this time was much less rushed and we tried to take our time to figure out what all of the different foods were. My cashier was also much nicer this time around. 

Once we finished shopping we came back and cooked ourselves some lunch. It was around 3:00, but neither one of us had had anything decent to eat since waking up a few hours earlier. I successfully cooked myself some pasta on the hotplates in our room and had that with a banana, some bread, and coffee. They don't appear to sell sweetener or coffee creamer, so we'll be on the lookout for those whenever we go grocery shopping again.

Several members from our group had gone to the beach just as we were getting back to prepare lunch. After we were done eating we decided to walk to the beach and join them. Our professor had left us directions to the beach in our welcome letter on the first day, so we simply started following the directions, hoping we were indeed going the right way. In the end the walk took us about 30 minutes, but wasn't too bad. We didn't see anyone else from our group at the beach, but had a really fun time sun bathing and talking.

At 6:30 we got dressed up to go to a restaurant down by the beach with our entire study abroad group and the French students from Interact. The Interact student group is made up of French college students who spend their summer breaks in Marseille to plan events for the Euromed study abroad students and help us out with various things like practicing French or telling us the best places to shop. The dinner lasted several courses and we didn't leave until about 11:30 at night.

Afterwards we all piled into one of the last buses running for the night and headed down to the Vieux Port area of town where many bars are located. I was sort of tired, but ended up staying out for a bit with Molly and we managed to make some new friends from our group. We had no idea where we were in relation to the hotel, so when we wanted to leave we had to get some of the Interact students to help us hail a cab. In the end we got home safely and pretty cheaply too. 

Overall it was nice to have another day where we could get acquainted with Marseille.