La grêve continue toujours

Hello all!  Sorry for the long time between posts, but I have been living my wonderful life here instead of writing about it!  I am feeling at home in Angers now, it doesn't feel like the last time I was here when I studied abroad in 2008.  Then it felt as though I was in just in a stage of my life, but now France feels permanent to me (this might be scary to some of you readers!).

I am sitting on the Thalys train to Holland right now to visit the family and thought that this is as good of time as any to update my blog since I have been oh so quiet over the last two weeks.

This is a pic from the local paper.

At this time, there is a massive grêve (strike) in France because the age of retirement has been raised from 60 to a whopping 62!  The country that works the least in the world is now complaining because they have to work a little more.  This strike is the biggest I have ever seen in France and has spread throughout all facets of life.  Transportation is down, schools are closed and public services such as trash collection have stopped.  Angers was in a bit of chaos during the last week.  The trash is just piling up in the streets and starting to smell really bad and the city was placing barriers around the mountains of trash in order to somewhat contain it.  Luckily the trash collectors have gone back to work but with the amount of trash that there was on the streets the collectors have still not caught up.  Therefore there are still huge piles of trash everywhere including outside of my house.  It got so bad that when I wanted to take out my trash, I no longer had to find a dumpster I could just throw my trash outside.  My friends lived right above one of the biggest trash piles and resorted to just throwing their trash out of the 3rd story window.  What is worse is that the kids who are on strike have gone to kicking and opening the bags of trash so now not only are there bags of trash everywhere, but there is litter partout!

The trash is not the only part of the strike that has affected me.  My students have also gone on strike which has prohibited me from working since I have gotten here.  I have yet to teach my own class and I won't be able to start until the 4th of November at the earliest!

When I say that my students are on strike I don't mean that they just stopped coming to school, no French kids take striking VERY seriously here.  Striking to the French is like baseball to Americans, it is the national past-time.  On the first day of the strike I unwittingly decided to go to my lycée anyways to see if there were any students there at all.  As I rounded to corner to the street on which my school was located I was met with the whole student population burning fires and barricading the door to the school.  I instantly turned around for fear of being recognized but I wasn't quick enough.  Some of my students tried to get me to join the strike, but it is not my battle so I just left.  After a few days I decided that I wanted to do something for my pay check so I returned to school and broke through the barricade to get to the door.  I wasn't met with very many happy looks or words when I did this.  The school was deserted except for a few teachers and the few boarding students who have been blockaded in and are unable to leave.  All in all, going to the school ended up being a waste of time.

The strike has also caused the transit across France to go absolutely haywire.  I was trying to take a TGV from Angers to Paris today and low and behold my train was canceled.  The only remedy to the situation was to hop on the next train with 100s of other people like me who didn't have a seat and stand in the corridor for the 2 hour train ride.  I made it but by the end I swear I was about to kill somebody!

My internet is about to go out because I will be entering Brussels soon so I will continue my update soon!  Miss you all!