Pastis limestone text

The last and most important thing you notice is the limestone. Marseille is built on it, and you won’t notice this until you’re hiking its outer reaches, wondering why there is no dirt. There is no dirt anywhere. Plant life is abundant, but more of the desert than anything: cacti, rosemary, lavender, brush. Trees are rare; they are usually evergreen.

It has rained one combined hour since I arrived here seven weeks ago.

It is in this context that we encounter pastis. Pastis is an anise-based liqueur, around 45%, that is usually watered down 1:3 to 1:6 and drank outside, always outside. It gets down to 40º during the winter here, and hundreds of people dutifully throw on three layers and sit there, drinking whatever, but usually pastis.

To critique pastis is to critique this whole town, much like critiquing malört is to critique Chicago now, to go at a certain sense of the place. Malört is popular in Chicago not because of any particular flavors (none are local), but because we see ourselves in the no-holds-barred, brazen absurdiae of the thing. The ritual of a Malört shot is the psychic horrors of a Chicago winter distilled into thirty minutes of desiccated palate.