Today has been one of those full days I think you can safely say. First I rose at 06:00 with a view to getting into reception to meet my French and Nottingham colleague. but as always I started by having a quick look at my emails. It is a long story of technical stuff but basically I can no log onto my laptop and therefore cannot access any of the files I needed for today's presentation. Luckily I often have to share the presentation slides in advance and therefore a colleague had those on his laptop so I was able to do my work for today, presenting from his laptop.
Several hours later and a few meetings later we left site and headed back to the hotel for another quick voice conference before retiring back to our rooms to get ready for an evening somewhere. Now we have heard on the news recently that Marseille is getting quite notorious for gun crime but we also heard on the local news, or rather our French colleague heard on the local news that in the next town to where we are staying someone had been shot in the early afternoon, which must be the worse place to get shot. So we decided that if the gunmen are in the small town around here it would be safe to go 20 kilometres down to Marseille and we set off just in time to get caught up in the early evening rush hour traffic. But with our Nottingham colleague negotiating that we'll we were soon in the harbour area of Marseille but not before we had passed the dock area and the plethora of ships and two very large and impressive cruise ships.
We parked near the harbour and proceeded to walk around looking at the various sights. I have taken some nice photos but with my laptop been out of commission then I cannot get them off my camera so they will have to be posted at a later time. So along the harbour it is very touristy as you can imagine with the usual trappings for people to spend there money on. But what caught my eye was the statue of an elephant, just the same as we have seen in Luxembourg and in Germany. Even to the point of it been decorated in the same style. However here they also had statues of a lion, dolphin, camel, deer and a few more up and down the streets all decorated just as the elephant. Our first stop was at a marquee that had some People who we're opening and preparing oysters and people were going up and trying them for free. It may seem hard to believe that although they were free I did not have any. My two colleagues did but the smell that was coming from the area was enough to make you heave. It really was that bad to me. I was eventually rejoined by my culinary adventurous colleagues who declared the tasting a success. It must be a cultural thing as the French guy was exactatic whilst the Nottingham guy was just mildly pleased. I was just happy that for the rest of the night they managed to keep the contents of the stomach inside them.
We continued our walk and eventually found a small inexpensive restaurant to eat at and we partook of normal food and some that tasted a lot better than last nights fare. I suppose at this point I better apologise about last nights blog (if anyone read it) as I was very tired and I am not sure it all made sense. I would go back and dread it but I am tired again tonight and want to go to bed when I have finished this.
After our meal we continued our walk and as it was now dark we enjoyed some nice evening scenes. Again I took photos but again you can't see them. The harbour does look really stunning int eh evening and whilst we know the history of the place it did not feel intimidating as there were plenty of locals and tourists alike walking around the place. We eventually got back to the car and the short journey to the hotel in no time and declared the evening another success. So on that note it is now a hasty goodnight from me
Night all
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