A taste of French culture: Marseille

Read regular posts from Mihi. She’s a Kiwi from Wellington, New Zealand and each week she tells us about living in France and speaking French.

So I recently spent two days down south, in Marseille – France’s second largest city. I thought it would be pretty different to the northern Brittany region (A taste of French culture: Brittany) and it was. The cliffs in Brittany are rugged and green and battered by the Atlantic; in Marseille they are all white towering rock falling steeply down to the green Mediterranean. There’s not a black-tiled roof to be seen in Marseille; it’s all orangey-red.

Being in Marseille also illustrated to me the vast cultural differences that can exist within one country. I didn’t even really feel like I was in France when I was in Marseille. Walking the streets, you see a huge mish-mash of cultures. Combined with all the tourists, and the landscape more closely resembling that of Italy or Spain, I felt a little lost and very far from the France that I know. So, it turns out that after seven months of struggle to get to know a country, you can travel 700 kilometres south and realise that you have to get to know it all over again from scratch…

So, Marseille was an eye opener, but in a good way. A high point was visiting the area where “Plus Belle La Vie” is filmed, my favourite French soap (when mentioned it attracts the same kind of eye rolling as Shortland Street). A low point was… the dirt. Unfortunately, one of the prevailing memories I will have of Marseille is a general feeling of uncleanliness. I can’t target Marseille unfairly as I have seen people in Saint-Nazaire disinterestedly throwing their rubbish on the street… perhaps the problem becomes more evident in such a big city, where there is also a lot of poverty.

It didn’t help that after Marseille I went to Zurich, which must be one of the cleanest (and wealthiest) cities I’ve visited. That was a cultural jolt – Zurich was clean, orderly, very tourist-friendly, and everyone spoke good basic English. However, when we were in Marseille waiting for a bus that never came (another one of those French protests upsetting public transport) a Marseille girl heard us pondering over the bus timetable and asked us, in English, if we needed any help. Just to clarify – this kind of thing is, as far as I know, almost unheard of in France. She ended up showing us how to get to our destination as she was going the same way as us. Hurray, chalk up a point for Marseille!

Mihiata  – Saint Nazaire, France