Bechamel in Marseille

Yeah that’s right… I finally came up with a name for my blog.

SO why Bechamel in Marseille? First of all, I happen to LOVE bechamel sauce . Damn to hell my lactose intolerant self, but this rich sauce of butter, cream/milk, and flour is SO good. It’s probably one of the very few french things I can cook.

Combining this obviously overly French term with Marseille made perfect sense to me. Marseille is what everything Paris isn’t. No beautiful perfectly-coiffed Parisians walking down the street. Here we get grown men stubbornly wearing polyester Adidas knock-offs tracksuits with the omnipresent Olympique Marseillaises cap and tacky aviator shades. And the women dress much the same. Yes one can smell a freshly baked baguette in Marseille much like in Paris, but here you also get an intangible whiff of the urine soaked sidewalks and a sewer smell that I can only describe as “marseillaise”.

So why am I in Marseille then? Why am I not frolicking on the banks of the Seine with the Eiffel Tower in the background? Because I would rather be here than anywhere else in Paris. I feel that I soak up more of France then I ever would in Paris. NOT that I am claiming by ANY MEANS to be an authoritative voice on Paris, I just know that when the sun hits the Vieux Port just perfectly, even the urine doesn’t smell so bad….

And with that, I leave you with probably one of the more telling pictures of Marseille itself…

Best picture ever

a plus..