This morning Facebook told me it was 8 years ago today that I was in Marseille for a holiday with my Pa. A few months before I had been exploring the budget airlines’ websites to see what locations I could find at a good price. Among a few obscure destinations, I found return flights to Marseille for £11! So I booked it straight away and decided I would show up and find a hostel when I arrived. My dad, however, had other ideas and looked up flights with more respectable airlines and booked himself a flight to join me at £95 return with BA! So he left from London Gatwick and I left from London Stansted and we met in the Aeroport de Marseille Provence. We took the bus to the main city where our hotel was and were greeted by our bus driver, who shared our Singaporean surname!

My limited spending money was hardly touched over the course of the holiday with my super generous dad paying our way. Instead of a hostel, he booked us in to a hotel; he paid for meals and activities and regularly stopped me taking my wallet out!

Marseille is a port city which boasts an impressive harbour that shows off a wide range of impressive yachts and cruisers. Despite the traffic, the waters are pretty clear. There are a range of shops, restaurants and bars that line the harbour and we spent some time sat out front enjoying un café et un croissant while gazing at the boats, dreaming about owning one and we even googled a couple to see who owned them and what was on board!

On our first morning we wandered down to the Vieux Port and to our surprise the local fishermen were unloading their catches from their boats and were setting up a market. The sights were pretty incredible with lots of fish I had never seen before including a pretty impressive monkfish and a display of a swordfish head! The fish market is there every morning from 8am – 1:30pm, offering all the fresh catches of the morning. The fishermen were really friendly, I had the chance to try out some French and they took the opportunity to speak some English too. As we were staying in a hotel we didn’t have any means to cook the fresh fish (I can hear my chef cousin, Jeremy, gasping in disbelief!) so we took some pictures and made our way. We did, however, make sure we sampled lots of fresh, local seafood in the restaurants around the harbour!

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