Marseilles - Part 2

Ah, La douce France

Just one more on Marseilles... If you have never visited Marseilles, please do if you are ever close by. It is a charming place, lots of history to see, small streets, nice people and even it's own little arena where probably blood flowed many years ago. I actually wished I had had more time to visit more places. As you may have read in my previous post, my visit to Marseilles started off with a blast.

I finally met up with that secretary of my new distributor and first went to her home, in the middle of the city of Marseilles. It was a bit like stepping back in time, she had a very small house, with low roofs, three stories high though and decorated like I have not seen many after... it looked fantastic, a rustic, classic Mediterranean outside row house, a modern inside with all modern equipment and installations you could imagine. Even the guest bathroom was incredibly outfitted with an open oyster as the bath and the sink was a shell with an actual ancient amphora as the tap which when you turned on the taps, would overflow into the shell like sink.

That same Sunday, my distributor then picked me up from her place for us to have the afternoon and dinner at his house. I had just had lunch by the secretary and her husband, so I did not know where I would pack even more food in my stomach.... but hey, you only go to La Douce France a couple of times in your life, so might as well give that Living As A God in France thingie a good chance I thought. So Philippe, our new distributor, picked me up to carry me to his place. He had a then very modern Peugeot Turbo Diesel which amazingly to me performed just as well as any gasoline cars... and of course he was very wanting to show it off too! He then was telling me a bit about living in the Mediterranean area, the lifestyles, the sun, the food, the beaches... hey,Roger, ever been to the Mediterranean beach? Uhm, no, I hadn't actually...oh wow, apparently I HAVE to see this according to Philippe. and that is where we went before tasting the home cooking of Philippe's wife.

Now, before you get too excited about beach babes and mono-kini's, I would have to disappoint you as it was already November in theyear and really, although not freezing, temperatures between 15 and 19 degrees are not really sunbathing times. But I was still amazed about the beach, in particular it's size!!!

Philippe had told me about miles and miles long and hundreds of meters wide beaches, and he did not exaggerate.... those beaches were HUUUUGE ! I could just imagine being there in summer time.

Hey, Roger, want to go and driver on the beach? The sand was well packed, it had been raining the day before, so actually, the sand was more like a straight concrete now than loose sand.... so there we went, onto the beach. Our car was the only car, no people in sight... so Philippe shows me the ropes about driving, nah, make that racing on the beach in the winter Mediterranean. So that is how you spend you free time on a Sunday there...

WHOOOOPPPP BOOooom>>>> the car comes to a sudden stop. What on earth was that.... we looked at each other and although the motor was running, we weren't going anywhere again, it's like we were stuck, immobile, somehow?

So I tell him to stop giving gas and I got out of the car by opening the passenger door and throwing my left leg out. Something was not right here.... it was as I suddenly was trying to get out of a Maseratti or something, the car seemed so low to the ground... the sand... oh, my gosh... the car wheel was stuck in loose sand, and it being a front wheel driven car, it was just spinning loose in the sand. Apparently, after the rains, wind dried up some of the sands and heaped them up and if you hit those spots, well, basically your car gets stuck...as simple as that.

I told Philippe to try and reverse, nope, no help there...oh, geez, back wheel has also sunk into the sand...and yep, in fact, all four wheels had sank into the sand, so basically, the car was resting with it's whole under carriage on the sand, the wheels spinning in the mud of sand.

HA! Ok, a little summary here... we are on a deserted beach, car stuck in the sand, no thing like a cell phone, probably like 20 miles from the closest house and uh, nobody around.... Solution? Well, we find some planks or rubbish to put it under the wheels so the get some grip and we drive ourselves out, right? So we both go looking for anything we can find that would give the wheels more grip that just the loose sands. In walking for like half an hour we do finally spot somebody on the beach, fishing... we explain our predicament and with a smirk he says that when he goes home, he will call the fire department to pull us out, or maybe we will get lucky and meet up with a bulldozer or a tractor on the beach he says, followed with some good gut busting laughter. When he wiped away the tear in his eye from laughing (he claims it was the wind and the sand) he hands us a little scoop which he uses to dig up worms on the beach to use as bait. He tells us that the realistically only way to get the car out would be to basically dig it out. Don't forget, he adds, tide is coming up, so waiting on the fire department on a Sunday just may not be your best option if you love your Peugeot Turbo Diesel!

He explains....first wheel, dig out next to it so you can insert the instrument, which you use when changing a wheel, under the car to lift the whole car up as far as you can, then fill the space under the wheel with whatever stuff you find on the beach, the lower the car again.

Then proceed with the next wheel, and the next and the fourth one, only to start over with the first and all the others a second time to get all four wheels leveled with the beach. Then you want to find even more scrap on the beach to lay out a pathway from where your car is to the harder sand areas.... et voila....simple!

Yeah, right, simple.... i call it a combination of IRON MAN competition, weightlifting, rowing (which simulates the digging) and hey, let's add jazzercise to the mix cause if you see the weirdest angels we were working at... buuuuttt, it worked, we actually got the car out, just the two of us. It took us about three and a half hours to do so, but we did it.

We both agreed to make this a compulsory activity for any new team members in our companies...hahaha, because team building is exactly what we did that day. We are still friends today although we live far away from each other now. And let me tell you, that lunch I had had by his secretary, looooong gone by the time we finally arrived for dinner by his wife. Never been so appreciative for a nice meal after a good days work.

Regarding the fisherman who was probably still wiping tears from the wind gusts (yeah right), well, those tears were probably even rolling more and harder after we left to start digging out the car, because uhm, tides? Well, tides in the Mediterranean are only a couple of cms, not more than an inch or two...so the water would never have reached the car anyhow....

I sincerely hope the fisherman caught a shark that was stronger than him and that he had to pull and tug to fight the shark for at least 3 or 4 hours to avoid being pulled into the sea himslef! Ha, tides!!!

Nah, whoever you were, Mr. fisherman, thanks for the little spade and the good advice, you earned your laughter! Living like God in France, yeah, well, seems like God has a good sense of humor! ;-)