Day 6: Aix-en-Provence, Marseille

Megan and I sardined ourselves into Frankie's bed with her last night. I awoke, (after a three-in-a-bed sleep perturbed by a duvet whose edges I couldn't wrap my legs over) to the sound of rain. We were naive to think it was over. We went back to sleep hoping it would stop when we re-awoke, like a bad dream. Like the very worst of dreams, it continued.

Later we gave up all hope of fair weather and ventured out, flip-flopped feet freezing and covered in muddy puddle water (our real shoes were long deceased). Frankie lead us round Aix's beautiful cobbled streets, yellow walls so much brighter than Clermont's drab volcanic stone, even in the rain. There were fountains in abundance, on every street corner. The town was overflowing with them. Corroded cherubs faces, dribbling lions, bulbous, calcified shapes, moss-covered and steaming with strange spring water. The streets still shone with water. We slipped and slopped in our flip-flops, into the cathedral with its strange green light, ornate green organ and grinning stone dragon. My camera clicked in the heavy silence.

That afternoon, whilst peering into a patisserie window, Megan smacked her head against the glass. We laughed. Fifteen minutes later, freshly purchased cakes in hand, we returned home to Frankie's. Megan dropped the cakes. We laughed at her, again. She picked them up. Then she stepped in dog shit. We laughed and laughed and laughed. She rinsed her flip-flop in a puddle.

We took the bus to Marseille. We sat on separate sides, gazing out of separate windows, thinking about  our separate lives. Then we got off and became Siamese travellers once again. Two girls together, blonde and back-packed, small and tall. We sat on the steps of the station, gazing out at the pied grey skies, the mountains, street-lights the pale green of a shallow sea, and a church perched high on a rock. The city stretched before us, its beauty dampened into sublimity.

Nikolai and Julien picked us up from a metro station and drove us up to their house on the hill side, overlooking the sea. A tabby cat and two fat black dogs. We got on like a house on fire. Then the sun came out, and set the hillside aflame. The sea shone below the horizon like a strip of magnesium, burning white.

In the supermarket, the four of us larked about and picked out food to cook for dinner. Later we cooked Toad in the Hole for them and their friends. "Le Crapaud dans son Trou". With onion gravy, courgettes and green beans, and apple crumble for dessert. They loved it. Their friends had couchsurfers too, a German girl and a Swedish one. We spoke Franglais and laughter, a universal tongue, and went to bed happy and exhausted in a sofa bed covered in cat hair, to the sweet lullaby of a fat dog's snores.