You may have heard about the recent strikes in France. Apparently the government is talking about changing the retirement age from 60 to 62, so people (teachers, transportation workers, etc) are going on strike to protest this change (making it very difficult to plan trips by train). Apparently high school students care about this as well, because today my students went wild. In the morning, they blocked the main doors of the school with trash bins from up and down the street, and after my class at 10, they took to the streets, shouting and blowing whistles and generally creating havoc for cars and passersby. Of course, their march took the route I wanted to take to the market, so I was forced to take a detour. As annoying as this was, I must admit I'm pretty impressed by this amount activism in a high school population. When my students told me about the protest this morning, I was skeptical and asked if they really cared about their retirement pensions at the age of 17, or if they just wanted to skip class, but they assured me no, it's their future too. Upon further discussion on the matter with Sam, she pointed to me that additionally, if people are forced to work longer before retirement, there are fewer jobs available when these kids graduate in, oh, about 7 months. Well that would piss me off, too! It just seems weird to me since I didn't grow up in a place where strikes are the norm. Marta, my spanish friend said that they refer to France as "le pays des grèves" or "the country of strikes" and I have also heard strikes referred to as France's "national sport".
I eventually managed to get out of the line of fire and made it to the market to meet up with Hadley and Jessica, and after perusing the market for a while we headed back towards the main square to have lunch. We decided to go into this really fancy chocolate shop to treat ourselves to truffles after lunch, and I couldn't resist trying the tomato-basil chocolate, which was actually quite good, despite tasting exactly like tomato, basil, and chocolate...
I finally got around to taking some photos of my school's courtyard on Wednesday, when the students have the afternoon off
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