Strike 2.

18.11.2007

You don’t get to home base by strikes—everyone knows that.

Not the French.

The second (of potentially many) reprisal of the transport strike has choked the already somewhat precarious economic and political situation to near standstill here in France.

Now I’m all for a little adventure, a little labor union action here and there. Apparently, for examples, my old roommate, the venerable Mr. Jason Gutstein, is working for a union in Argentina. And you know I wish him well.

Well not in this case. First, it’s cold—really cold for walking 1.5 hours to work, which is the average amount of time it takes me to do so and many other Parisians walking alongside. I won’t even go into the plight of the outside-of-the-walls, banlieue-residing 9 million people, many of whom rely on some form of transportation to get to work, school…

This strike has evinced a slightly surprising fact: most Parisians, in fact, do own one or more cars. They just usually don’t use them, because transit is better, cheaper, easier…and avoids horrible traffic jams that arise from a centrally planned, circularly structured city.

Now, I will detail my own peregrinations since the strike began, November 14^th at 20:00.

Tuesday Nov. 13^th—I walk from work by Courcelles metro stop in the 17^th to the Blanche metro stop in the 18^th and get food on the way on Place de la Clichy, on my way to the Moulin Rouge with distant relatives. (45 minutes).
We get lucky on the way back and catch a stray train on line 2.

Wednesday Nov 14^th—I purposefully slept over at the relatives’ to only walk 5 minutes in the morning. Left work at 6pm. Got to Boulevard St. Germain at 7pm, got home at 8:20pm, cold, hungry and angry. (2h20 trajectory).

Thursday Nov 15^th—Tried metro in vain at 8am. Walked until Montparnasse, half an hour. Got on #28 bus to St. Lazare, seemed like a good idea at the time. I even had a place to stand, more than usual in these conditions. The bus took 1.5 hours, I could have walked equally fast if not faster. Walked 15 brisk minutes to work.

Class was canceled today…yippee! Turns out Brussels-residing teacher could have come to Paris (London, Brussels, Frankfurt, trains still run), but too hard to get to the school from the railroad station. So I leave work around 6:30pm, start walking with the thought of catching a public bike…I try four different locations, but either the bikes don’t like me, or they’re broken, or there aren’t any left.

I eventually catch the #80 bus around St. Phillippe du Roule, on Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 8^th. I have never heard of this bus and have no idea where it goes. Its terminus is far from where I want to be. Needless to say, I am hanging on for dear life in the bus’ back door, literally when the door opens outward, there’s a bar in the middle. I am hanging to its top and standing on its bottom. My adrenaline is rushing and I feel the adventure. I stay on the #80 for about half an hour, where there are these 2 middle-aged American tourists, who’ve clearly been to Paris before, but are braving this as though it’s there first and only time here. All I can hear is them talking, mainly about the French people around them, and how uncomfortable it is to be in that damned bus.
I laugh inwardly, I always do. Haha. Little do they know, most of the French people around them understand English, it’s 2007 in Paris. Hello people, are they f-ing stupid. French people don’t talk on public transit and they don’t make eye contact. It’s like a theater show.

I get off the #80 at Ecole Militaire, get on instantly, and luckily on the #92, straight to Montparnasse. This bus is uncharacteristically empty and I even sit down. 15 minutes later, I get off, walk to Gaîté (Gaiety as I call it) and finally find a bike willing to accommodate me. Too bad it’s a 4 minute bikeride home at this point, still I can’t complain. (Total day’s travel—4h20min, appalling).

Friday Nov 16^th. I decide on biking. Get up at 7am. On the bike by 8, but it’s a ‘cassé’, a broken one, as indicated by the friendly Post-it note. I battle on to Gaîté, switch bikes, and voila, I’m at work at 8:30am, an hour early, feeling great to have beaten that monster—French Socialism--for at least one day.
4pm, I leave work to go to the airport. Flight is in 3 hours, no trains or buses to Charles de Gaulle. I am forced to take a taxi, bourgeois class. I see 2 chaps getting into a taxi right at Courcelles. With my freshly extracted taxi-headed Euros in hand, I ask them to share a cab, ascertaining that they indeed are going to CDG.
They turn out to be 2 Swedish intellectual property lawyers in Paris on business for a day. Traffic is brutal everywhere, especially on the Perif., the circularly-abutting highway around the Paris city walls. I talk to the Swedes, they’re not as funny as one would assume, but very nice.

1h20 minutes.

Sunday Nov 18^th. It takes me less time to fly than to get home from the airport. The Air France-sponsored bus I take doesn’t leave for half an hour, then traffic and rain all the way to Gare de Lyon. Then, 2.5 hours later, Montparnasse, finally. I walk home in the rain, Chinese food in hand at the end. Total trajectory from CDG (3 hours about).

We’ll see what happens this week, I’ll try to not let it spoil my birthday…

I love France.

As an addendum, the Paris Opera and the Comedie Française are also on strike. Again, yippee! La di freakin’ da, almost.

More importantly, parts of GDF and EDF, the ‘publicly-traded’ (khem, national monopolies on gas and electricity), may also strike. In that case, I will be skipping town, straight one of the aforementioned cities still operating regular transit to Paris: London, Brussels, Frankfurt. So keep your phones on, just in case I come to your neck of the woods.