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Between Marseille and Paris it is 660 kms. That is about the same as between Bordeaux and Nice (636 kms) or between Berlin and Brussels (652 kms). However, it is more than between London and Edinburg (535 kms) or between New York and Washington DC (329 kms).
When you live in Marseille, Paris seems just as far away as Hamburg or Berlin. It is about 45 mins by plane and 3 hrs 10 mins by the fast train (TGV), so objectively it is not really that far, but in the minds of the Marseillais Paris is the North. People have made it clear to me what they think of Paris:
A client said to me the other day that I would need new clothes for Paris. Well, I thought, here is another fashion victim, but before I could think further, my client told me the secret: "It is cold in Paris, Charlotte!". Now this comes from a Lebanese woman speaking to a Dane....
At a birthday party yesterday another woman told me the horrors of all horrors: She had heard only the day before that in Paris they were still wearing jackets in June!
Then there is the thing about sunshine. "Oh, Charlotte, you will miss the sunshine!" It is true that statistics show that Marseille has got about 300 days of sunshine per year whereas Paris has got about 75 days per year. That one is hard to argue against, admittedly.
Apart from the weather Marseille and Paris are worlds apart. I won't go into the clichés, but although Marseille is a big city, it remains a village (or a thousand villages, as they say here). People talk to each other spontaneously. You are at the greengrocer's looking at melons, and somebody will give you his suggestions about serving melons. Even in a relatively "neutral" place like the supermarket, somebody might make a comment about a product in your caddy, or you are standing at the bus stop and somebody will starting talking about the eternal transport strikes.
Marseille is a tough city, though. If you are too slow at the traffic light, the driver behind you will not hesitate to get out of his car to agress you verbally (or even physically). Handbag and golden chain snatching is everyday business, and hardly a day goes by without a holdup at the newsagent in one of the more "popular" areas of town.
Marseille is also a dirty town. Everybody complains about the garbage in the street, and everybody leaves his garbage just outside his door. In my area people even hang their bin bag on a nail on the house wall, and every evening after 7 pm the very efficient garbage men will take everything away. Now imagine a day with Mistral. The Mistral is this strong wind blowing from the north and thus coming down through the Rhone Valley. On those days (and for many days after) you have garbage everywhere.
Everybody in Marseille complains about the garbage, the crime, the suffocating village feeling, the lack of cultural events and yet, when it comes to Paris, everybody thinks of the Capital with HORROR! It is cold, it is rainy, it is full of Parisians, it is expensive, it is dirty. It is simply not a place to live. Paris is ok for about 2 or 3 days, but then it is time to go home.
Having lived in Marseille for nearly 9 years I have come to appreciate Marseille and the south, and like everybody else I now think of everything north of Lyon as the North. So mentally I am now trying to prepare myself for the cold, rainy, efficient Paris (which I assume by all Danish standards is still the warm, sunny, kind of Mediterranean south). Another 6 days before my Odessey towards the North begins....
