Marseilles, third impressions. A room with no view.

I still don’t know if we failed an IQ test or not when we booked a hotel in Marseilles.

My first three thoughts were to stay at the Sofitel. I’m kind of glad we didn’t. We kept trying to find it, thinking we’d drop in for a posh cup of tea, and the only time we actually managed was when we went to Fort Jean. So we were standing high up, looking out over the sheer drop to the water:

And I spot it just across from us. All I need is a rope to scale down the wall and a taxi-boat down the bottom, it’ll only take a few minutes to get over there. I’m guessing this is the only way of getting to the Marseilles Sofitel. We tried a more pedestrian route twice with no success whatsoever.

Fortunately, (since there are no taxi-boats in Marseilles) we had decided instead to stay at Grand Hotel Beauvau Marseille Vieux Port. Here’s where we may have failed the IQ test. We were tossing up whether to spend extra to get a Port view window or to save it for restaurants and went for the latter. As you can see from my last post, we ate well, so I don’t begrudge the decision to go for the room with no view.

This is an old, quaint hotel which rests partly on the laurels of its history. Chopin and George Sands, amongst other nineteenth century luminaries, had stayed there and indeed, etched into the wood of the antique desk in our room was a heart with ‘C&G 4ever’ scratched into it. There was also a very VERY old cigar butt with lipstick on it at the back of the desk drawer. This place is nothing if not authentic. But the view of Marseilles, port or any other bit of it was pretty much exactly the same as the one of Marseilles I have right now….and I’m penning this in Geneva.

The good thing about a room with a window looking onto nothing at all, was that it prompted us to hang out of an evening in the hotel’s cocktail bar. This picture is from the hotel’s site, but it is exactly where we sat and what we saw:

Who needs a room with a view, when a bar with a view will do just as well?