En grève et d'autres choses étranges pour les Nord-Américains

Having been here for almost six months now, we are getting used to many things like motorcycles driving into the oncoming lane to get ahead of traffic, or the fact that it always takes ten minutes to make any type of decision with a lot of hand waving and everyone contributing an opinion. There are however things that we are not yet used to and those are the subject of this blog.

The first one is strikes. The mentality around striking and “solidarity” here is so different from Canadian standards that I think labour leaders should do exchanges between France and Canada.  Perhaps this would result in some golden labour mean that would solve all of the world’s labour problems.

This is a picture of our local grocery store this morning. This is a picket line like I have never seen before. They not only all had lovely orange signs and vests, but as you can see they literally barricaded the entrance with grocery carts. Clearly no one would be crossing this picket line.

When we were preparing to come to France and when we first arrived people warned us about the frequency of strikes, but we did really appreciate how frequent they are. The thing that continues to surprise us is how everyone just shrugs them off, regardless of how inconvenient they make life. The other amazing thing is how organized strikes can be. This is a notice sent out by the public transport in Marseille. Note that this schedule was labelled as a “mild strike”. Service is reduced to various percentages depending on the line. Crazy huh?

The public transit here seems to be very active in their striking activities. Since this notice there have been at least two other strikes that we know of. We don’t know exactly why they are striking, but they are very organized about it. I must say too that their techniques work. A couple of months ago, a man waved a gun in front of a bus driver and the whole system shut down for the rest of the day. People were stranded with no time to prepare, but apparently the man who waved the gun was turned in.

Walking around on Wednesday I encountered another thing that throws me off a bit. The music. Firstly I must say that a large amount of the music on the radio here is in English, which for me is a bit disappointing. On Wednesday I was walking through a park that was hosting a kids’ day. There was a big stage for performance, games, those big inflatable bouncy castles, and music blaring over the speakers.  This all sounds like an brightly coloured family fun event, right?  Well yes in every way, except as I walked past the lyrics coming out over the speaker were something along the lines of “And now I’m F****** you, I don’t love you but I’m F****** you.”  How can parents expose their children to this? And don’t tell me they don’t know what it means. The lack of censorship on radio can be just as bad at times. I must say that my itunes includes songs with the occasional swear, and I have no problem with artists using strong language to prove a point, but I just feel unclean listen to music were every second word is a swear. What is the point?