Nov 2007

I have been having an interesting time. I think life suddenly decided that we were all getting a bit too comfy with our French lives. For example, I was supposed to go to Sweden this weekend to see a long lost cousin of the Mayeux variety who is studying there. However, because of some silly paperwork issues I am essentially not supposed to leave the country. That is until I have a titre de séjour to accompany my visa. Hopefully this will resolve itself soon as I can't even travel within France at the moment. The train workers have been on strike for a while now, meaning that even if I had been able to use my plane ticket to Stockholm, I would have had no way of getting to that Parisian airport. This is made all the more frustrating by the fact that I have not had school for almost three weeks now. Which brings me to my most interesting aspect of French life yet.

We had another general assembly last Monday and it was packed. You see, having no class, no one really had anything else to do. This time, the assembly was about 3 hours long and managed to remain civil even though people were very emotional about their causes. After those lovely hours, everyone got up for a "pause" which turned into everyone wanting to vote at the same time. This time, the vote was to be by secret ballot, as had been decided in another assembly. So everyone waited in a MASSIVE line to vote. And waited. And waited. I waited for 2 full hours just to get into a tiny room, pick up an envelope and two pieces of paper, one branded with a "oui" and the other with "non." I skipped the private area with the curtain and shoved my vote into the envelope. After having my student card checked 3 times and stamped (a voté à Lille III) I was able to successfully deposit my vote into the box with all the rest and head home.

Now I know that the whole thing seems a little ridiculous, but I will give them some credit. They had around 3,000 students show up to vote, a vast majority of which also attended at least part of the assembly. I wonder how many Hendrix students would show up for a three hour assembly on a day that we don't have class and would then wait 2 more hours to vote. Judging by the problems we have to get people to show up for Senate debates and then to vote afterward, my guess would be not very many. These assemblies are like Project Pericles combined with Student Senate. Debate and Discussion for hours followed by Decisions. It takes a certain amount of dedication to a cause to sit through all of that, to actively participate. It is a level of dedication that I don't think I have seen much of with regard to politics on Hendrix's campus. Granted, people are very passionate about their causes, I just can't imagine such a large number of us going through 5 hours of democracy.

Either way, Monday evening, the votes were tallied and the numbers ran something along the lines of 1,000 against the blockade and 1,600 for the blockade. So, I had another week without class. I used my time very wisely, I assure you. I did attend a protest (in French manifestation—which continually had me singing the song by Les Cowboys Fringants "à la manifestation…" for those of you who are familiar with the Sainte Anne's classic). I had no idea what to expect, it being my first French protest and all. A bunch of students lined up with banners and flags and a police escort.

Matthias and I decided that we should walk along, if only for the cultural learning experience. So, the police leading the way, we took a lovely hour and a half walk around Lille, through the streets, passing by the major buildings, and ending at the prefecture. We practiced our listening skills (the good old écoutez et répétez exercise) with the chants. The ones that I could understand went something like this:

La fac n'a pas besoin de patron;
Ni selection; Ni frais d'inscription
(Universities don't need a boss, nor selection, in the sense of applying to college, nor tuition. Does any of this sound familiar?)

À ce qui veut privatiser les facs
Les étudiants répondent: RESISTANCE
(To those who want to privatize the universities, the students respond: RESISTANCE!)

We met up with those policemen with the people shields at the prefecture. And then I went home and ate soup.

There isn't another vote until Thursday as to whether or not the university will remain blockaded. And today is major strike day for everyone and their mother. Lookie here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7102890.stm
This is a good one too: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7102840.stm

Yeah. Welcome to my life.

So what have I been doing with my new found free time? Eh, I've done a few things. I bought a coat. A real one that is incredibly warm. I've been doing a lot of cooking with and for other people. Thanks to a package from home, I am now able to make gravy. Which means that my last two meals were definitely hamburger steak and mashed potatoes with gravy and then rice and gravy. Can you say satisfying? I celebrated Katja's birthday at a Chinese restaurant with a bottle of wine. Took a trip to Brugges for all of five hours. (Now, I know that I said I can't really travel with the visa thing. But there isn't really a check point between here and Belgium for cars. Plus, if anyone stopped me and gave me trouble I really wanted to say, "Oh yeah? You don't even have a government!" It's true, look it up)

I also went to Versailles on a very cold and wet Saturday. The palace was terribly ornate and luxurious… disgustingly so. I much preferred the gardens, although they are pretty much just as elaborate. We wandered around them for hours, paused for hot chocolate and then I went back out in the weather again to wander around some more. I saw things that I have been seeing in my French books for years—Marie Antoinette's Petit Trianon, Le Petit Hameau, La galerie des glaces. I walked the same grounds as several different King Louis and saw the secret door where Marie Antoinette tried to escape the masses of Parisians when they stormed the palace. I plan on going back next semester, because although everything was very beautiful, the fountains were not running and the statues were already covered up for the winter. Plus, to see those gardens in the spring? I can only imagine. Several pictures for your viewing pleasure:

French glory

Me, in front of a palace

What you see coming out

Toni, claiming it all for himself

Fancy gardens

Even the trees got in on the act

Those silly covered statues

On the way to the Petit Trianon

Yep, Marie Antoinette had a farm.

And her own wine

This animal surprised us.

As Sarkozy recently told the US, the two countries have a history of being friends. Did I mention that not too many people are thrilled with Sarkozy at the moment?

I guess that about sums it all up. Today there was another protest, but as it is grey and cold outside and I am not French, I didn't really feel much like going. But the Christmas market opens up this week and the entire down town is decked out in lights and garlands and a fair has moved into the main square. As for Thanksgiving, we are making a valiant attempt at cooking what we can without an oven. But we are bound and determined to introduce this holiday to the others. I think it will be particularly fun to have Thanksgiving dinner with the English.

So my university is still blockaded. And I will definitely go into the details soon. (I mean, there is obviously nothing better to do when in France with no school, right? Glad we agree.) But I will leave you all with this article. Yes, it is in French, but scroll down to the handy dandy map and note that all points colored red represented blockade univeristies. So it's not just my school that is being funky.

Click Here!

More to come soon. Promise.

I had a relatively calm weekend. I ran into John Porter (a Hendrix grad, French major, Fulbright scholar and New Orleans native) in the metro. Twice. He was on vacation here from Paris and so went met up and walked around for Lille a bit, sharing what we missed and what we loved. It was good.

I went to the cemetery on November 1st for All Saints Day. Everyone goes to the cemetery then to put flowers, clean graves, and so on. Just outside of Gare Lille Europe, I was surrounded by fall. I had managed to not notice the changing of the leaves because I don't see enough trees. Sad, isn't it? But at the graveyard there were some beautiful trees, all in full autumnal glory.

Walking around, I felt at home. By that I mean I saw Lemaire, Delahoussay, Lahaye, Ponthieu,
Leblanc, and other names that made their way over to Louisiana. Kept my eyes peeled for one of ours, but the closest I got was a M. Marcel 'Cuir 1902-1982.

I spent the rest of the weekend with Matthias and his friend Anne from Germany. We hung out and attempted conversation in multiple languages, staying up forever a few nights ago having a bizarre sort of exchange between myself, Matthias (German, decent French, some English) and Anne (German, little English, very little French that she kept mixing with Spanish as she was in Peru for a while).  We not only managed conversation, but talked about all kinds of things, using miming and dictionaries and each other's random language knowledge. 

We then proceeded to do a lot of really regional things Eating moules et frites was one of these lovely activities. It's a regional dish— mussels and fries. With the beer of the region, of course, Ch'ti. Although not my favorite meal, overall it was satisfying. That might be just because someone else cooked it. Eh.

For as calm as the weekend was, this week is making up for it. Yesterday, I realized that I still don't have my titre de séjour— which is necessary before my visa expires. And that appears to be sometime soon. This leads us to the confusion as to whether or not I will be able to leave the country like my tickets to Sweden for next week would like me to do. I have to sort this all out. Lucky for me, I have no classes for the rest of the week and therefore plenty of time to run around the French Bureaucracy. Because you see, today, I could not enter my university.

What's this you ask? Let me attempt an explanation. Sarkozy, the wonderful new French President who is currently visiting our own, passed a law (LRU) that wants to shift the funding of Universities from state funding to be more dependent on contributions from private sources and wants to make the universities more autonomous. It's really a lot more complicated than that, but that is what I understood. Essentially, no one really likes it at all, because it means that the students will potentially pay more to go to university (an unheard of amount in the hundreds of Euros…) Plus, it was also argued that autonomy of the universities would make them unequal, as each region has different resources (Nord Pas de Calais, my region, was until recently counted among the poorer regions of France) Where Americans would have a problem with the involvement of the state, here it is the exact opposite… the problems are stemming from the withdrawal of the state. Students are also worried that this means the schools focused on business and science, as well as more prestigious schools will get the majority of funding, therefore the majority of good professors, etc. As my division of the University (Lille III) is the Language, History, and Human and Social Sciences division of COURSE we are going to not like this. The first step in attacking this situation is to hold an Assemblée Générale. At this assembly, there is a presentation of the law and what it means. Then there is an open debate with a mic passed amongst about 1, 000 students in an auditorium with 3 minutes of free speech time each. Talk about democracy in action, my friends. The main moderator had a megaphone to let people know when their time limit was up and warn them of other various rule breakage. I stuck around for the majority of the meeting, amazed at this bizarre form of parliament that was before me. Occasionally I'd ask the nice French kid beside me what something meant or how that was going to work and other details of the sort. He was very nice and did his best to answer my questions. He was also incredibly amused by how I found all of it so fascinating. His own questions came after every time the States were used as an example—how much University costs there, that people join the army to pay for school and end up in Iraq and so on.

In conclusion, the assembly was supposed to start at 12:30, actually started at 1:00, discussion lasted until 3:15 whereupon voting on the propositions began. There were several ideas on the table, however, only one vote was necessary as the decision to carry out an immediate blockading of our university was passed narrowly. This means that when I showed up to try and go to class this morning, this is what I found:

The sign reads: Declaration de Guerre au Gouvernement Sarkozy. Simply translated: Declaration of war on the Sarkozy Government

Interesting, no? I'm still rather intrigued by it all; How saying "we don't like this law so we won't learn!" will bring about the appropriate changes; how no elected body made this decision; how this is still considered normal. Tomorrow is the actual protest in downtown Lille. I plan on going in an attempt to better understand. Anyway, I have no class till after Monday, when there will be another assembly to decide if this will continue. I'll be sure and let y'all know.

EDIT:
Amanda infromed me of some important distinctions that may make for an easier time understanding all of this. Or it might just be more complicated. Either way, I am too lazy to go back through and make tons of changes, so here's a quick copy and paste thanks to her:

"It's important to keep in mind that our thought of 'government' is the ever-present, enduring one; 'administrations' change every 4 years. It's the other way around in france--'le gouvernement' changes every 5 years, and 'l'Etat' or 'l'administration' is enduring. Also, when translating for americans, keep in mind that for us, 'state' has a different meaning from 'l'Etat'; you may want to say the 'national governement'. ... Depending on what you're translating, important distinction."

Thanks Amanda!

Now, for Halloween, things get interesting. You see, France doesn't really celebrate Halloween. (Contrary to that C'est L'Halloween song they taught us in French class years and years ago) In fact, I think it might just be the crazy Americans who dress up. Well, these crazy Americans decided to share this with everyone. So, we all dressed up and went out, running into random groups of dressed up people and delightfully telling them Happy Halloween. We ended up hanging out in the one bar that was decorated for the evening. They played ridiculous music, and for the first time since Sainte Anne's I heard [/i]Tomber la chemise[i] and nearly died laughing. The place also gave a free shot to anyone wearing a costume. Speaking of costumes, mine was rather brilliant, if I might say so. Let's go at this in steps shall we?

This is a metro ticket, front and back. Please take note of the color.

This color happens to be the exact same color as my towels. So what do I do? In the true student council spirit of creating anything and everything out of nothing and duct tape, and with the practice of time and budget limited costume bowling of OR, I made myself into a metro ticket:

Not too shabby, eh? I was proud. The corner was even bent down, as I was déjà composté, too. We had a pair of Weasely twins, several cats, a mask, and a good night in general.

david did not try on the cat costume before renting it, so it was a little smaller than he might have prefered.

Matthias thought the whole idea was just amusing. So we made him put on a mask.

this is what happens when tall friends take pictures

And there you have it. We managed to celebrate Halloween, even if there was no candy involved. At the very least, French people got to look at us and point and say, "stupid international students." And the international students got to point and say, "silly americans."

Definitely worth it.