Transportation strikes

This is the new entry for one of the following life lists: "Things I Like" or "Things I Don't Like." Guess which one it's for.

(Psst ... if you guessed that "transportation strikes" goes on "Things I Like" then you should reconsider your answer. Just a hint)

So yeah, there is in fact a large transportation strike going on here at the moment. They're protesting the proposal to raise the retirement age to 62, and there's been pretty wide-spread participation. According to the mom here, who works in the French education system, it's been causing unrest in schools, too, since some of the teachers in public schools are striking and there have been student demonstrations at several high schools, some of which got violent.

My experience with the strike, though, is pretty much limited to yesterday. Or early this morning, if you want to be all technical and accurate. I went to into Paris in the early afternoon to visit the Musée d'Orsay (more on that later, for now, two words: So. Awesome.) and then met up with some other au pairs in the evening. I knew they were planning to stay quite late, but I'm not exactly a night owl, so I decided to catch the 11:23 train from Gare Saint Lazare back to Villennes sur Seine, the itsy-bitsy town a few km from us (no idea why they have a train station and we don't) where I'd left the car.

Yeah, well, because of the strike the online info about train times was wrong and the only train running to Villennes last night was what is normally the last train of the night, the 1:03. I had been told to avoid the last train and the first metro runs because they're super sketchy, so I wasn't about to take it by myself. Villennes, where I get off, is an adorable town of a few thousand, and perfectly safe. Some of other stops on the train are less sleepy and reassuring. Like Poissy which, while fine in the daytime, has been characterized by one of the other girls as "that town where all the criminals live." That is not strictly true, since lots of nice people live there as well, but it is a little creepy to be in the Poissy Gare Sud late at night. Fortunately for me, one of the other girls decided she didn't feel like staying out last night either, so we caught the 1:03 together and everything was fine.

Well, fine in the sense that we got to Villennes and back home without any trouble, not fine in the sense of getting home when I wanted to or in the sense of not having to take the sketchy train or in the sense of not having to sit around Saint Lazare much longer than I planned. Not fine in those ways, but fine in the I-was-totally-safe way.

Actually, because of the strike lots of other people were, just like us, forced to take the 1:03 rather than an earlier train, so I felt more secure than I otherwise would've on a train that late. But that twisted benefit of the strike did not, at all, outweigh the serious inconvenience of having to wait nearly 2 hours longer than I expected to have to wait. At all.

And I know that's sort of the point of strikes like this, to make the public sit up and pay attention to the cause, but I cannot tell a lie: mostly I just thought, "Ok, yeah, they want to raise the retirement age 2 years, but doesn't everywhere else in Europe except Russia have a higher retirement age than 62 already? And seriously, it's cold in this station. So start working again so that I can catch a normal train. Thanks."

This is perhaps not the kindest or best approach to addressing what may be legitimate grievances. But it was cold at Saint Lazare, so my sympathy was kind of (very) limited.

I hope they can get the strike issues worked out though, because while it doesn't really bother me during the week (we have to drive to our French classes anyway because even when they aren't on strike the buses don't run at times that work for us), lots of other girls in my French class need public transportation to get to and from class and aren't able to get - or have to come really early/leave really late because only every second bus is running (there's still some transportation available, it's just limited).

Okay, but my next entry will be about the Musée d'Orsay! I wanted to do one entry for both, so that I could end on a happy note, but this kind of got away from me and is super long, so ... yeah, it'll have to wait. Next time: art! windows! awesome furniture! impressionism! picture taken illegally inside museum! Yeah, you know you're super excited.