Marseille, The Beginning

So, I am going to Marseille.
Another Ryanair cheap flight booked and a destination that I don’t know much about. I was recommended by Matilde to see a few places but my visit is short and I don’t know if it is enough to discover the city. Anyways, I am not interested in checking every piece of the city. This travel and many others that I do are mainly to unplug myself from the daily life, live another real offline reality and try to meet different interesting people with different a lifestyle and a different view of things.

In Marseille, there should be a big Arabic population from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and others. It is a bit interesting for me to get to meet some of them and talk about important issues. I am mainly interested in concepts like identity and how it is interpreted specially by second generation immigrants and even third generations. My interests in this topic were raised by the book “The murderer Identities” by Amin Maalouf. Who is a Lebanese immigrant to france himself. A course about philosophy of cognitive sciences by Bim Heasleger also increased my interest in this topic. Moreover, my current situation as an Arabic student in Italy who probably will end up living in a country/counties other than Egypt.

My travel mate will be the book:
The Bible, The Qur’an and science
The Holy Scriptures Examined in the Light of Modern Knowledge.

which I got from a bookstore in California in 2009 and didn’t finish it. Now is a good time to read it over.

I will be writing in English and Arabic about this trip, not translating but rewriting the article. A turkish guy once told me: one language = one person.. two languages = two persons.. and I am starting to feel this while typing these words.. the flow of ideas is definitely different between Arabic and English.

I met two Turkish brothers on the train to the airport. They are here for business and they noticed the book I am reading so they started a conversation. Nothing special.. except that they are from Konya, a city where Jalaluddin Rumi comes from “Mawlana” as they name him (Mawlana in Arabic = Our Master). He was a religious preacher that turned into sufism and became a poet, a writer and a man with words flowing like a spring that brings life to whatever it touches. in wikipedia

I am planning to focus in my trip on people and their lives. Trying to catch whatever I can of the aspects and the particularities of societies in Marseille.. What do they have different? Probably will take a lot of photos of random people. I don’t know..

No plan for the moment.. I will sleep in a hostel tonight and tomorrow I will be hosted by Thibaut who will not have a lot of time to share with me. However, he offered to give me the keys of his apartment and probably try to arrange a meal together.. otherwise, I will have to be independent in my stay at his house

Posted a message on the main Marseille group and got a reply from a French man who invited me over for a meal in the weekend and probably a walk around the city with his children.. We will see..

That’s it for the beginning.. will be back when I have something interesting..

من أدهم..عن أي شيء

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