More Strikes...

(from Betsy) You may have read that there was another day of strikes across France today, a new milepost in the ongoing protest against the CPE law ("first employment contract"). President Chirac allowed the law to go into force this weekend, but also proposed some amendments to take effect later. This doesn't seem to satisfy the unions and students leading the protest movement -- they're still calling for the law to be retracted entirely. Some of the BBC articles say there are signs that the unions are ready to negotiate, but personally the quotes don't read that way to me... maybe it's just subtleties of the French language being lost in translation.

Anyway, we just wanted to let you know that we're fine. Metro trains were running slower and crowded today, but I still got to work (and home again) in almost my usual time. And everyone is good natured about squeezing more people onto the trains, I guess they're just used to it. There were some incidents in the protest march on the east side of the city (our apartment is on the west side), but generally peaceful. The number of people who marched is somewhere between 84,000 and 700,000, depending on whether you accept the estimates of the police or the protestors.

Hopefully this isn't going to be a weekly tradition... I suppose it depends on whether there are negotiations this week, and what the outcome is. I asked around my office about why Tuesday seems to be the day of choice for calling strikes. No-one knew for sure, but the general sentiment was, "Well, you don't want to wait until later in the week because everyone's tired already, schools are closed on Wednesdays so it's not enough of an impact, and if you have it on Monday that might interfere with people coming back from a weekend away." So by process of elimination...

That's most of the news from here this week. Carter just started some extra after-school lessons to help him catch up on French and is really excited already about how much progress he made in a day, Calvin is feeling more comfortable with his school, and Chris had a nice lunch with the "adaptation" (i.e., English-speaking) parents from Carter's school. I am busy at work, with some interesting stuff to do, and feeling a little less like the new guy. And best of all, spring is really here now, with trees and flowers blossoming bit by bit. Yea!