Marseille is lived in. Litter and piss blend with the unremarkable. Clothes hang to dry on balconies without eliciting specific panic. Street art is a given. Here in the centre-ville, this polyethnic metropolis seems at ease with itself. If there’s tension to be had, it emanates from the rowdy rugby fans making their way through Vieux-Port. Our guide into town, a shortish woman with youthful hands, intimates that this passion for rugby is rivaled only by that for football. Here, at the Stade Vélodrome, France hosted some 1998 World Cup games, winning it for the first and only time that year.

A hike-worthy view of the stadium and the Old Port is to be had atop Notre-Dame de la Garde. At nearly 150m, the Neo-Byzantine basilica competes with the sea for this city’s center of gravity.

Between hunger pangs that make paying attention a chore, I listen as our guide recommends a visit up the church and wistfully bemoans Marseille’s economic slump when France lost her colonies. 

We are warned away from the quartier nords. 

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The sun and sea take turns to disappoint. The first fails to break cloud and the moody Mediterranean denies us a scheduled croisière. My food brims with lactose and, unhabituated to big-group travel, the needless tyranny of synchronized sightseeing irks. It is in this sour mood that our study abroad coordinator invites me to reflect on our study abroad experiences, What will you be sorriest to leave behind?

Colleges, not unreasonably, want to know what students intend to give and get from their studies abroad. We map this triumph before we set sail. Independence is the awaited triumph of travel. Good travel *must* stretch autonomy, at least appear to. I wondered by my own silence if I had really learned nothing or if I was hungrier than I’d estimated. Was travel wasted on me too? 

Unquestionably, no. And not simply for the parks, market at Barbès, Baldwin’s Paris, the best haircut of my recent youth, or the joy of a walkable city but for all the irreproducibly banal. To see the city and myself in it.

Independence, I murmured to no one in particular, gaze fixed on the revolving door of the restaurant’s busy kitchen, already nostalgic for the fussy manner of American waitressing.