Hello from France, land of insanity. Today we will have a lecture on the current crises plaguing France and how those crises interact with the life of a young American teaching assistant. We'll begin the lesson with some important terms: grève (a strike) and manif/manifestation (a protest). Take notes. Those words will reappear quite frequently in our discussion.
The first crisis, which is the least serious, is that of heightened terrorist warnings for Americans in France. For the time being this does not concern us all that much, since our teaching assistant is in farmland near Rennes, with mostly cows as neighbors, and she is not overly concerned about terrorists coming to get the cows. That said, she does hope to travel to both Paris and Strasbourg for her upcoming break, and while she'd rather not die, she is not going to stay among the cows for a week and a half with no work.
Crisis number two has already been discussed several times, but since the French just won't stop striking, we have to discuss it again. The French are still annoyed that Sarkozy wants to raise the retirement age by two years, Sarko is still planning to do it despite all the grèves and manifs, and since everyone's too stubborn to back down, the strikes continue. There was a very large one on Tuesday, there’s going to be a manif Saturday, and our teaching assistant’s school is talking about striking next Monday and Tuesday.
In addition to the fact that she will not be able to teach, the grèves also mean that the teaching assistant becomes rather stranded in farmland. The metro in Rennes continues to run since it’s automatic, but the buses pretty much stop, and if they work, they’re running late and are packed. So transportation becomes quite an issue, and as a result, socializing does as well (farmland is highly populated with cows but sparsely populated with twenty-somethings).
Crisis number two is not limited to those with jobs—in France, anyone who so chooses can go on strike, and this includes students. Yes, I know that you think you ought to have a job as the whole point of going on strike is to stop doing one’s job, usually as a means of getting more pay or better benefits. You are all wrong. Today all of the students at our teaching assistant’s school decided they were going to join in the party and go on strike, too. In today’s classes, she had one class with no students, one class with one student, and another class with a whopping nine students. According to the teachers there, the students will likely be on strike again tomorrow since it is a Friday and no one wants to go back to school on a Friday after striking on a Thursday. One teacher even suggested that they might grève all next week as well since there’s a vacation coming up at the end of next week. If that is the case, our teaching assistant would be very bored since she still has to go to school so she gets paid. And she wants to get paid. Plus she doesn’t think it would kill the French to work a little more, but she’s not going to say that since she might get shot if she did. But she does think it’s cool that high school kids care about this stuff, though she wishes they’d care a little more about their English classes.
Our third crisis stems from the second crisis. Petrol workers are among those striking (they’ve been on strike for a while, not just for a day here and there) and they’re not letting anyone get in to transport any gas out. So now people in France are starting to worry about running out of gas, and there are lines at gas stations. According to some spokesperson quoted in The New York Times, there are enough reserves to last a month, but the French people are panicking nonetheless.
Thankfully, this is one crisis that doesn’t worry our teaching assistant. Unless the buses run out of gas and stop running, as that would once again leave her stranded.
Crisis number four is actually an American problem, since the French are benefitting from it. The exchange rate between the dollar and the euro has the euro doing very, very well. The dollar was at its strongest against the euro in several years sometime in May. The euro gained on it a bit over the summer, but it held steady at about $1.30 to €1 until mid-September (the point at which our teaching assistant arrived in France). In the past month, the dollar’s lost over ten cents, and the exchange rate is now hovering around $1.41 to €1. The teaching assistant is seriously miffed, as her rent is costing more and more each month despite the cost in euros not changing at all. She looks forward to getting paid in euros at the end of October and thus not having to pay attention to the exchange rate again until she returns to the US, when she’ll change all her euros back into dollars. No doubt at that point the dollar will suddenly become ridiculously strong and she’ll lose money switching over her euros.
We'll now conclude with some personal anecdotes from our teaching assistant:
1) I tried to explain baseball to my host family two nights ago. It was exhausting. I'm pretty sure there are no translations for outfield, batter (l'homme qui frappe!), bases, home plate, home run, strikes, and a number of other terms. And if you hadn't spent your whole life hearing those terms, then they mean nothing when I try and use them to explain the game. I don't think I they quite got the idea of things. And then they wanted to know about American football, and I didn't even know where to start on that. They don't even know what a yard (the unit of measurement, not yard as in lawn) is...I told them football was like soccer except the points were different and you could use your hands, and you could tackle people. Very inaccurate, I know. Do you have a better explanation?
2) Apparently when there’s an inch of snow in the area life shuts down. Everyone’s been telling me that the metro stops, schools are shut down, and no one leaves the house. Also, it sounds like most people are scared to death to drive in the snow, so no one touches their cars. Essentially, everyone hibernates until the snow goes away. I’d suggest the US adopt this, but then those in Milwaukee would easily spend six months of the year without ever leaving their houses.
3) I had three terminales yesterday itching to ask me a question about what something meant in English. What was this phrase that had them so intrigued? Holla back, and specifically, hollaback girl. I'll take it. I even got all linguistic on them, explaining that holla comes from the verb to holler. They were excited to figure out what it meant, and I was excited that I could provide information that their teacher (a male in his upper fifties) could not. Everyone wins!
Au revoir from le pays aux foux.
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