Ask any French undergraduate what their favourite aspect of their degree course is and they’ll almost all say the same thing: the year abroad. Every modern languages student in the UK has to spend a compulsory year in the country of the language they’ve chosen, allegedly to work or study. Of course, when you set a 20-year-old loose in a warm country full of new people with nice accents, not a lot of studying actually occurs. This year I was forced to live in Provence. It’s a hard life.
Provence was my first choice of study destination by far. The promise of sunshine, natural beauty and cheap and plentiful wine was irresistible. My British friends could barely conceal their envy when I told them that I would be spending the summer months on one of the most famously beautiful parts of the Mediterranean coast. I was somewhat surprised, therefore, that every time I told a French person that I would be studying at Université Aix-Marseille, they recoiled in undisguised horror.
“You’re studying in Marseille??” they shrieked with fear and panic.
“No,” I reassured them, concerned. “I’m studying in Aix-en-Provence but the university has a Marseille campus as well.”
This was always followed by some expression of relief and the same earnest warning: “Don’t go to Marseille! You’ll get shot!”
Slightly alarmed by the adverse reaction that the city provoked in everyone I spoke to about it, I decided to do a little bit of research on it. What I found did not reassure me. Marseille’s reputation is bad. It started out as the city where the Black Death entered Europe and its standing hasn’t improved much since then. The government has spent several decades and millions of euro trying to change this but it’s proven difficult. Turns out that no matter how many times you tell people that it’s a European City of Culture, they will insist on bringing up drug dealers and gun crime.
Read the rest of this article in I Honestly Think Magazine's first issue! Pages 70-72
Provence was my first choice of study destination by far. The promise of sunshine, natural beauty and cheap and plentiful wine was irresistible. My British friends could barely conceal their envy when I told them that I would be spending the summer months on one of the most famously beautiful parts of the Mediterranean coast. I was somewhat surprised, therefore, that every time I told a French person that I would be studying at Université Aix-Marseille, they recoiled in undisguised horror.
“You’re studying in Marseille??” they shrieked with fear and panic.
“No,” I reassured them, concerned. “I’m studying in Aix-en-Provence but the university has a Marseille campus as well.”
This was always followed by some expression of relief and the same earnest warning: “Don’t go to Marseille! You’ll get shot!”
Slightly alarmed by the adverse reaction that the city provoked in everyone I spoke to about it, I decided to do a little bit of research on it. What I found did not reassure me. Marseille’s reputation is bad. It started out as the city where the Black Death entered Europe and its standing hasn’t improved much since then. The government has spent several decades and millions of euro trying to change this but it’s proven difficult. Turns out that no matter how many times you tell people that it’s a European City of Culture, they will insist on bringing up drug dealers and gun crime.
Read the rest of this article in I Honestly Think Magazine's first issue! Pages 70-72
