View of the Old Port of Marseille

Up at 6am, we were on the road by 6:30 for the two hour journey to take Magnus to a specialist vet clinic in Toulon for a hip replacement operation. Unknown to us, Magnus has a congenital hip deformation and several weeks ago, he started limping and his hip began to swell. An x-ray showed that he did not have a secure ball and socket joint and that his leg was slipping out of joint. An operation was the only realistic option.

Trooper that he is, even without breakfast, he trotted into the clinic tail up, sharply in contrast with the other dogs, all thoroughbreds, who were tail down, whimpering, and whining including a large Alsatian and an even larger Irish Wolfhound. Clearly, they knew something that Magnus didn't. Of course, we were concerned, but were reassured by nonchalance of the vet, who assured us that the procedure was routine. The plan was that he would be operated on in the morning and by 3 pm, we would call to check his progress. It was expected that he would stay for at least one night for observation, but we wanted to see him in the afternoon, so we decided to pop down to Marseille to kill time, which is 30 minutes away.

Marseille is France's second city and there is no way that our brief visit would do it justice. We headed to the Old Port, from which the city has evolved and therefore a good place to start. The streets are particularly narrow and congested with parked cars, but fortunately, we found a covered car park a street away from the port. The Old Port, is a rectangular in shape, with an entrance in one corner. In olden times, it was large enough to accomodate the vessels for the movement of commercial goods and passenger, but today it is a large marina for pleasure yachts.

Marseille does not strike me as a city, where there has been a lot of town planning. There are grand buildings very close to slummy areas and as mentioned the streets are quite narrow including important boulevards for the main flows of the traffic. Grafitti preodominates in the side roads, but one cannot dispute that it is city with character to spare.

Two months in France and we finally had our first Asian meal at 'La Maison de Ravioli', which translated into English means 'The House of Dumplings'...obviously. We hadn't had breakfast and were happy to step into the restaurant at 12pm on the dot, but we were not the first guests. By 12:20pm the small restaurant was packed and they were turning people away. We had an excellent casual meal of two types of dumplings, sliced Sechuan (i.e. spicy) pork and home made fried noodles. We would definitely go again.

We called the clinic at the alloted time and were pleased to be told that everything was fine and that we could even take Magnus home that afternoon, which was an incredible relief and not because we would not have to make a 4 hour return trip the following day. When we arrived at the clinic at 5pm, Magnus was up and about, but still pretty stoned, but comfortingly, he was up and walking if a little unsteady. We finally arrived home at 8pm, happy that all of us were home again.