My First Experience with France on Strike

I had to rise pretty early this morning in order to make it to my class at 8:15.  My host mom dropped me off at the bus stop on her way to work a couple of minutes before the bus came.  It didn’t.  Fifteen minutes after it was supposed to come, around the time of the next scheduled stop, the bus finally came.  Apparently the taxi drivers were on strike and 500 of them were blocking access to the middle of town with their vehicles.  Fantastic.  Also, when one transportation union is on strike, apparently it is a cue for all other public transportation workers to act like jerks, because the bus seemed to go deliberately slow and the driver yelled at someone without provocation.  Also, it must have been my morning, because there was some guy who thought he was acting pretty fly by blaring French hip-hop music from his smartphone.  At one point, he actually stood up in the aisle while the bus was moving in order to bob his knees in a kind of dance to it.  When he finally exited the bus, there was an audible sigh of relief from the otherwise reserved French passengers.  Also, there were two young people speaking Russian next to me.  Interesting morning.

The bus arrived at my stop at 8:15, the time that class was supposed to start, and it is a ten minute walk to campus.  So, I hurried up the street and across campus (wouldn’t you know it, my classroom was on the opposite side of campus from the entrance) and then up the stairs to find the classroom empty and dark.  No professor, no students.  Again.  This was the other portion of my class from yesterday.  Frustrated, I walked down to the tram station near the bus stop, intending on passing the two hours before my next class at the Minnesota Bureau.  A young lady was dispensing free newspapers from the publication 20 minutes, which is a sort of news in brief.  As I stood at the tram stop, I noticed a bulletin on the scrolling marquee: tram service would be interrupted due to the strike from 9:30 until 6:00 in the evening.  As it was near nine then, I didn’t want to get stuck at the Bureau, so I took my newspaper, bought a large coffee, and camped out in the café until my class.  Reading the newspaper, I learned of the full extent of the strike.

My grammar class went well, a partner and I gave a small practice presentation with other groups in the class that was well received by the professor.  After that, the girl and I decided to head for the Minnesota Bureau.  At the entrance to Paul Valéry, we encountered a few other Minnesota students, one of whom said that the trams weren’t running and she had just come from walking all the way from the Bureau, which is several tram stops down the line.  My classmate and I decided that if we had to walk, we might as well go together and follow the line.  To our surprise, there was a tram just pulling into the station as we reached it, headed in our direction.  We hopped aboard and discovered that the trams were running again.  How fortunate.

At the bureau, I sat down with one of the Minnesota advisors to get to the bottom of my difficulties at finding the class.  The course was one in which I was very excited for, a course on les bandes dessinée, or French comic books.  Unfortunately, the was moved to a different time slot that conflicted with my grammar class, which was required for me to take.  I think that Paul, my advisor and also my teacher for my French multiculturalism class, was as disappointed as I was.  He did, however, give me directions to two of his favorite bandes dessinée shops in the Old City.  In the meantime, we found two other potential courses to replace that one.  The first is sociology of art class and the other is a course about the history of cinema.  Hopefully one of those will suffice.

After that, I struck out on foot from the Bureau and bought myself a sandwich for lunch.  Eating it, I walked through the Old City, exploring and finding one of the two shops.  After looking around, I returned home via bus.  Due to the protest, however, the bus routes were still messed up in Montpellier.  When some passengers inquired about it, the driver was very rude responding to them.  Luckily enough, however, the routes in the farther out villages, such as my own St-Jean-de-Vedas, were unaltered and I managed to get home safe enough.