Transportation
When we were in Marseille of March 2013, there was a city wide strike on March 12 of the all the public transportation workers that completely shut the system down. The story was that a bus driver had made a racist remark to a young man and this man attacked the driver with a knife. The transportation workers then responded with a strike asking the government for greater protection of its workers. The strike came and went and I don't believe any of the worker's demands were answered. Our group was very reliant on public transportation so we needed to walk into the Vieux Port, which was about a 90 minute walk. It was interesting how drastically the strike effected our day because almost everything in our itinerary was planned around the use of public transportation. The strike fits well into our conversation of human rights, specifically labor rights as well as the rampant racism in Marseille.
The public transportation of Marseille also brings to light another kind of contrast. The transportation system is a fancy, pristine and fast fleet of buses and metros (subways). They run on time, are very fast and through a combination of taking a bus or the metro, you can get almost anywhere in the city. As a sufferer of SEPTA (Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority), I was very impressed with the high-tech public transportation that was relatively affordable and very accessible. As was mentioned in the 'Drugs' section, the demographic of passengers gradually then drastically changed depending on where you were in the city. When I traveled to the Calanques, many of my fellow travelers appeared to be of Asian ethnicity which I had not observed anywhere else in the city whereas when our group went out to the Northern Quarters, there were many Muslims on board and other people from the Maghreb region. Then, when we traveled to the Vieux Port or Le Panier, it was mostly white, wealthier people aboard the bus or metro. I think this drastic difference in who was riding on public transportation depending on where it was going in the city demonstrates how Marseille is extremely segregated in where different ethnicities of people live. Using public transportation was a highly valuable part of the trip to Marseille. It provides a very easy way to watch as the architecture and wealth of the neighborhoods change as you travel away from the rich Vieux Port area. The rapidity of the transportation also reminded me of one of the 360's themes of coming and going from place to place and alternatively feeling stuck somewhere. I witnessed many women walking the cars of the metro begging for money and exiting just before the train left the platform. These women serve as a nice metaphor for they are so close to leaving a place, a metro station but maybe have nowhere to really travel to so they are really neither from here or there.