A French summer in Lyon and Marseille

“No good.”

The ticket-taker at Paris Gare de Lyon shook his head after scanning the piece of paper that should have had me on the next train to the World Cup semifinals. He didn’t explain why my ticket to Lyon was invalid. Just that it was. I stood there, drenched in sweat, both from running to the station and that I happened to be in Paris during a heatwave.

I looked up to the sky and said, “Oh, my God, now you’re just being petty as fuck.”

But the accusation wasn’t directed at the station employee; It was directed at God.

The bad ticket was one in an already long list of frustrations on my journey. When my friend Zack first suggested this trip last year, he positioned it as a summertime French adventure of long walks, decadent food, lazy mornings mixed with work and relaxation that would give way to days filled with lightness and wonder. I couldn’t turn it down.

Plus, I wanted to go to a World Cup.

The plan was to spend a few days in London before traveling to France, but my initial flight from New York to Heathrow was overbooked. What followed was two days of standby hell as I kept getting bumped from one flight to another until a merciful gate agent who recognized me from an earlier flight got me on a plane to Paris.

”Why does this always happen to you?” my friend, Graham, asked when I told him about my troubles.

The answer is God. God is fucking with me. Not out of maliciousness, I don’t think, but a shared playfulness that sometimes goes too far.

God puts problems in my path, especially when I travel, and my job is to find hidden solutions to get what and where I want. The obstacles are sometimes ridiculous — once on my walk home from school a bunch of squirrels blocked my path and came after me when I tried to scare them — but the solutions often involve finding compassionate helpers, like the gate agent who I wouldn’t have seen again if I hadn’t changed my flight to Paris or taken the advice of going to Amsterdam instead.

God’s game resumed soon after I landed in France when I didn’t see my train to Lyon on the departure board at Paris Gare du Nord. I learned from an employee who noticed my confusion that not only was I at the wrong station, but it would take a 15-minute metro ride to get to the right one.

Even then, I still made it — with three minutes to spare. I felt triumphant, smirking at God and thinking, “Once again, I’ve won.”

”No good.”

I’m not an anxious person, and I often enjoy these misadventures, but there is an overwhelming loneliness that takes hold when things go wrong in a foreign country. If you know the language, you can choose not to speak — you can choose solitude and silence. When you don’t have that choice, you’re trapped in silence. It’s suffocating.

The long line at the ticket counter almost guaranteed I didn’t have time to make it on the next (and last) train to Lyon. Before I could come up with a new plan, a worker who looked like a darker version of my uncle spotted me in the crowd and motioned me over. Most non-Nigerians can’t tell that I’m Nigerian — even some of my own friends still forget. But anywhere I’ve gone, the Nigerians there have been quick to spot me.

He grabbed my hand and asked what was wrong before pulling me into the ticket office and repeating my story to his coworker. His friend looked at him, looked at me, looked at my ticket, and then told us to give him some time to take care of two other customers.

During our wait, the Nigerian man told me how he ended up in Paris — the menial jobs he worked and how he eventually got a job at the station which allows him to send money back home. Before our paths crossed that day, he had already helped two Nigerian families who missed their trains.

Anyone who has ever been an immigrant knows they often have to pave their own paths to navigate societal structures lacking in compassion and mercy. Some are based on pure kindness, such as knowing the owners of an African grocery store who will let you defer payment for food when you can’t afford it. Others are based on small monetary exchanges. They help you solve a problem otherwise unsolvable within the standard bureaucratic system, and you make it worth their while in return.

This isn’t a point of privilege — it’s the reaction to not having any to begin with.

The man in the office spent five minutes looking back and forth from my ticket to his computer screen before printing a ticket for the last train to Lyon. The train that was supposed to be full.

The Nigerian man explained afterward that he told his friend I was his sister’s son. And though the terms of his help were never made explicit, I gave him 30 euros.

Missing that first train meant missing England vs. the United States, but once I made it to Lyon and was en route to my Airbnb, I took solace in soon being able to shower, eat, and sleep after such a long day.

Such a naive assumption. The real art of pettiness is denying victory when the person is almost at the finish line.

The first time the key fob didn’t open the gate, I thought I was doing it wrong. A few more tries confirmed the gate recognized the fob but still wouldn’t open. It was the middle of the night, and all I could do was sit on my suitcase outside — in a French suburb where I knew no one — laughing like a maniac.

After playing this game with God for so long, you’d think I’d know better.

Lyon wasn’t crowded despite being the concluding host city of the World Cup. Walking around it seemed most people visiting Lyon were there for their own adventures that just happened to collide with the biggest sporting event in the world.

You could sit outside a restaurant in the middle of the city admiring the architecture or absorbing the scenery and totally forget you were at the World Cup. It happened to me multiple times.

As much as I was enjoying Lyon, I had yet to explore my ulterior motive for going on this trip in the first place. Marseille has had a pull on me for as long as I can remember— the more I learned about it, the stronger that force became. A city of immigrants and exiles. Of water and myths. A fiery place with open arms that doesn’t hide its struggles with poverty and corruption. A cosmopolitan city with people who are constantly under pressure to leave, but refuse to be gentrified away.

The only place I have ever longed for as much as Marseille is the village in Nigeria where I was born. Both have the feeling of home but in different ways.

The village is where I was born, where I became. I can feel the history of my family and my people pulling me back to it. It is in the foundation of who I am. Marseille feels like where I can live and die as an adult, and God willing, an old man. It’s where I will be at peace. It’s the place where the longing, daydreaming, and the pain of being and feeling out of place would stop.

It was made for me, which is why when I developed a heat rash on my wrist the day before I left, I was overcome with anxiety that my body was going to break down before I could see Marseille for myself.

All you can see are trees and sky before entering the train tunnel that leads into the city. It is only when you come out the other side that Marseille unveils itself in breathtaking fashion. Sprawling hills dotted with houses and ancient buildings. Boats scattered along the coastline of the Mediterranean. In an instant, you go from trees, sky, and darkness to one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

I was prepared for a day of wandering with only two places in the city I considered mandatory to see. The first was Old Port. I wanted to be by the water, watching the people, the boats, the seagulls — to know whether they did follow the trawler. I wanted to sit and simply be there.

I then roamed the city with no destination in mind, from the port to the Cathédrale La Major to the Basilique Notre-Dame de la Garde.

I walked through Le Panier, an art-covered neighborhood of shops, cafes and alleyways and the oldest district in Marseille. There, I saw people like the Nigerian man from the train station and young African and Arab boys following the universal dress code of football shirts and track pants. I walked past people whose stories I felt close to, and I was happy to be in a city whose identity was built by people searching for a better world. Lyon was the lightness of a vacation, but Marseille had the heaviness and the force of life.

Fittingly, the city makes you work to see the beautiful nature surrounding it. If you want to see the Instagram version of Marseille, you have to walk the steep hills that’ll take you there. Long staircases are the only way to get inside many of Marseille’s beautiful churches.

My favorite picture of the trip wasn’t of the gorgeous landscape. It was of a woman, a stranger standing outside on the balcony of her apartment overlooking a cruise ship harbor.

She was the only person on the balcony, smoking and gazing out at the water. Like she was waiting for something, or someone, or imagining a different life than the one she had. It reminded me that even in the places where we wish to be, some people there might be looking to escape to somewhere else.

After a minute or so, she looked over at me and smiled. I raised my camera, silently asking if I could take her picture. She nodded and then she went back to smoking and gazing as if I wasn’t there.

The other place that was mandatory for me to see in Marseille was the Stade Vélodrome.

Since I was young, I’ve loved three teams: Arsenal, Marseille, and Milan. Out of those three, it’s Marseille’s stadium that I had to visit before I died. Not that I don’t love the San Siro, which is more legendary in terms of Milan’s success there, or the Emirates and Highbury before it, but they don’t represent the city and its myths for me in the same way the Vélodrome does for Marseille. San Siro and Emirates are stadiums for teams; the Vélodrome is for Marseille.

François Thomazeau wrote about Olympique Marseille in Le Monde years ago:

”MARSEILLE is a city of lies of such peculiar exaggeration that the town invented a word for them — galéjades. Marseille has a knack of turning every petty memory into myth, to try to make life bigger than it really is. And its most powerful dream machine is its football club, Olympique de Marseille OM. It sounds and reads like the name of a strange cult, which in many ways, it is - the Stade Vélodrome, the temple to the only religion that unites rival communities in town.”

When I arrived, only one person was there — a man sitting nearby, eating lunch. I had a knack for finding people in public solitude in Marseille. Had I been alone, I would have bent down and kissed the ground. I would have thanked it for Eric Cantona, Samir Nasri, Hatem Ben Arfa, Dimitri Payet, Benoit Cheyrou, Lucho Gonzalez, Chris Waddle, Franck Ribery, Didier Drogba, Steve Mandanda, Marcel Desailly, Abedi Pele, Mamadou Niang, Robert Pires, André-Pierre Gignac, Djibril Cissé, and Florian Thauvin. Even Zinedine Zidane, who never played for the team, but was born in the city and was a citizen of the team.

I didn’t want to leave. I had a World Cup final to attend, but all I wanted to do was to stay at the Vélodrome. After tweeting a selfie in front of the stadium, I reluctantly made the journey to the train station where I realized Marseille’s English account had quote-tweeted the selfie with the words, “Welcome…” and the emoji for home.

I thought of Thomazeau writing about Gunnar Andersson’s death after he had come to Marseille: “Was he trying to leave town, to make it back home to Gothenburg? Did he realise you never leave Marseille once you have been lured there?”

I knew the USWNT would beat the Netherlands in the World Cup final, but I was quietly cheering for the Dutch. The U.S. is a much deeper and talented team than its competitors. They’re so good they can often overcome tactical deficiencies by sheer ability. You don’t really suffer from not playing the best players if the second-best players are still better than the opposing team’s. I wanted the Dutch to win, to give a sign of hope that other teams were catching up to America.

The United States is an ironic soccer country in that everywhere else in the world, institutional sexism had termed soccer as too masculine for women and sabotaged the game. In America, it was seen as an effeminate sport for such a long time that it allowed women in the U.S. freedom that others didn’t have. That’s not to discount the historical sexism and misogyny, both institutional and explicit, that still exists in American soccer and sports in general. Beyond the weird perception of masculinity and sport, the USWNT’s dominance in soccer can also be traced to the implementation of Title IX in 1972.

They’re much more talented than every other team, but that dominance, while deserved, is also predicated on the imbalance of opportunity that exists in women’s soccer. The hope then, is that the powers that be in other countries will start investing in women’s soccer, creating opportunities for participation, and professionalizing the game so much that the players won’t need to suffer and work multiple jobs while trying to be athletes.

It’s because of this context of inequality and sabotage that there was a sense of universal solidarity to the World Cup final I don’t imagine exists in most male tournaments. It felt as though everyone, while cheering for their separate teams, was also cheering for the sport as a whole. The competition is still there, but so is the understanding of how delicate survival of the sport is. When the final whistle blew and the Dutch players fell to the ground in disappointment, many of their fans stood up and cheered with joy and pride as opposed to a showing of sadness.

After the game, my friends and I made our way to the city to celebrate the USWNT’s victory — a relatively well-behaved party after a World Cup win. It seemed impossible to cause pure chaos in Lyon, at least as an outsider. The only thing removing me from the illusion of lightness were occasional sightings of gun-toting military forces tasked with security during the games. We passed a group of them en route to a McDonald’s, which we soon realized was closed despite being surrounded by a large group of Algerians immersed in celebration. Their display went from peaceful to chaotic as I looked up and saw what appeared to be an incoming grenade.

It hissed upon landing, clouding the air and making it instantly unbreathable. As someone who has been pepper-sprayed before, the pain of it was familiar. There was no clearer sign that the lightness of the World Cup was over, and the chaos of the African Cup of Nations had started.

I wanted to apologize to my friends when we finally got home, as it wasn’t their fault that we got pepper-sprayed, or even the fault of the Algerian fans. I wanted to tell them that God was fucking with me. And there was no way he’d let this trip end without making me play the game one more time.