Marseille is Marseille

A few stereotypes about the character of Marseille have been rattling around in my head this week.

"Marseille is in a hurry" and "Marseille is Beautiful" and "Marseille is full of Vandals"

Marseille is Marseille.

If you've seen Taxi, (no, not the 2004 remake, the original -- a silly French action-comedy movie from 1998, it's a Luc Besson picture starring Samy Naceri, Frédéric Diefenthal, and Marion Cotillard, and everybody is having a great time.  The show is often stolen by Bernard Farcy though as the bumbling, inept, and casually-racist Commissaire.) then you already have been given a little insight into the Marseille mentality about driving and roads, which is :

GO FAST.

Busy sidewalk? Scooter don't care.

Crosswalk full of pedestrians? Peugot hatchback will approach it at 50km/hr and assume that they'll get out of the way.

There was a boldness mixed with paranoia to the way it seemed that pedestrians moved in the city because damn, so many of the motorized forms of transport seemed hellbent on mininizing fuel economy and maximizing g-forces experienced by everyone involved.

Unfortunately, this is very hard to photograph or video.  Suffice it to say, it's a place to keep your wits about you when on foot, and I enjoyed myself immensely because while all that was happening the pedestrians are ALSO in this mindset and so will stride into the street with purpose and also reclaim what they can.

(A couple of times when I saw young drivers try to sneak through a light and wind up with their car in a crosswalk, I witnessed pedestrians get loudly verbally abusive with them about it, which was honestly, a delight.  More people in cars should get berated for thinking they are entitled to block or disrespect traffic that isn't also in cars.)  

A couple of other things stood out about Marseille, and I think they're both summed up in this picture.

The architecture of Marseille is gorgeous -- the city really thrived in the interwar years, and the result is that it has a huge amount of Art Nouveau architecture that is just stunning.

And as a port city facing North Africa, with a massive immigrant population and people passing through all the time -- there is a constant struggle among the young and poor in the city to grow, make the city their own, and express themselves, and one of the ways that comes out is in street art and tagging culture.

There's so much beautiful architecture and embellishment on buildings here.

And there is so much street art and vandalism, and the line between those two things blurs, and makes you question what counts as embellishment.

The visuals of the city blurred together for me over my time there, but left me with a very strong impression that I want to return and spend more time in this city.

I have a couple more specific stories to tell.  Next, we'll take a trip down someone else's memory lane.