ST-RI-IKE Two...

Sorry to disappoint if you were expecting a blog on Euro-baseball— not that it exists… If Parisians have a national pastime, there are probably many possible nominees like chain-smoking, pouting, constructing 3-part abstract philosophical arguments, drinking 17 cups of espresso and/or glasses of red wine per day, soccer (to name an actual sport), riding motorbikes in very fast and dangerous ways so as to kill as many bicyclists as possible or going on strike.

Paris public transit is on strike for the second time in the past 2 months and we’re now entering week 2 of this strike. It’s strange to think that I lived here for an entire strike-free year last year—what a sheltered and protected existence never to have experienced the Parisian grève! Now, I’m getting to know it well. For the first strike, my French friends advised me to stay home and not waste my time, but rather than take their French word for it, I dutifully checked the RATP website to see if my RER train would be running the next day and got the confusing message that is was ‘quasi nul.’ What was nul, exactly? It seemed to be missing a subject— did that mean hardly any service or hardly any interruption? I called a friend to ask and she reminded me that I lived in Paris and that if there were ever 2 possible interpretations for anything—especially relating to the service-industry—it was always the more negative and inconvenient one.

Why is the rail industry on strike, you might ask. I don’t really know all the reasons and I think there are some legitimate complaints like salary cuts despite the rise in the cost of living, but I’ve also heard that it’s about retirement benefits. SNCF employees used to be able to retire at age 50 and then the president seemed to realize that although it was nice for former train conductors to have time (like 25 years) to garden at their country homes and build model trains with their grandchildren, such a young retirement age was also INSANE and costing the république tons of money. I hate that in France when I oppose something like retirement at 50, I sound like an American republican since they are against social welfare, retirement benefits, and the poor in general. (I’m extremely left in American politics—Bush and American foreign policy regularly horrify me, socialism and national healthcare are great, etc., etc), but when everyone you know back home will be happy if they can retire at 65, I can’t get excited about the right to stop working when you’re only 50. My parents are both older than that. Also, At the risk of sounding reactionary once more, I’m also not entirely sure you can have a successful national economy if no one works more than 35 hours a week and they go on strike all the time, but I do appreciate the quality of life here and Americans definitely work too many hours with too little vacation. I am secretly a little impressed that a strike in France can really paralyze the nation. And that the SNCF does it despite all the money they lose. My experience of strikes in the US is usually just a small picket line of maybe 5 or 10 guys who work on the assembly line at the local Chrysler or any other automobile manufacturing plant standing around drinking coffee outside in the cold with a few hand-lettered signs about unfair management. It only affects me in that I’ll honk my horn in vague support as I drive past.

For the second strike, it’s prevented me from going to work for the past 2 days. It’s been on for a week now and I’ve never walked and biked so much as I did this weekend, so at least the strike is good for my health and the motorbikers seem less fixated on trying to kill cyclists, mainly because they now ride their motorbikes exclusively on the sidewalk— to avoid traffic, of course. Now there are other messages on the RATP website like ‘strongly perturbed traffic’ and ‘1 train out of every 6.’ I’ve actually forgotten that other things besides transit can be perturbed in French—it took me a few minutes to realize that the news broadcast I was watching earlier was about the weather perturbations (that seems to mean cold fronts) instead of public transit ones… Despite feeling like a big slacker this morning, I didn’t go to work, figuring that one train would come like every 2 hours and I’d be trampled alive by the Parisian crowd trying to take it with me and if I even managed to get to the suburbs alive, I would have no students. Tomorrow I will probably also stay home. France is slowly robbing me of my Protestant Work Ethic, but I have to admit that when the RER is perturbed, I feel ok—very unperturbed, in fact— about staying in bed…

Paris is beautiful in November- despite strikes and rain

Le bonheur, c'est peu de choses.