Strike!

***I am writing this post after having spent the entire afternoon drinking wine. That's what happens after you lock yourself out of your apartment in France, and the only other person with a key is the one person without the cellphone (Pete). I beelined for the closest cafe, and enjoyed glasses of bordeaux until I heard from our visitor. Then we went out for dinner....***

So, today at the nursery school, there was a boy who was clearly older than all the other kids, who I had never seen before. I learned that he was a son of one of the teachers, and that his teacher was on strike, so he was spending the day with us. The discussion that ensued was one of comparing teacher strikes. This teacher was very surprised to hear about teacher unions, and all teachers going on strike, etc, in Canada. I was very surprised to not have read anything about this teacher strike in the morning metro paper on my way to work...

Apparently in France, only 1 in 5 teachers go on strike, because as they don't get paid for striking, many can't afford to. Usually strikes only last one or two days (??!!!), and when they are really long it's maybe a week or two, but parents get mad because they don't know what to do with their kids (isn't the whole point of a strike for it to be inconvenient??). All public elementary schools in France are legislated by the country, so they are the same all across the country. My assumption then was that all the teachers in all of France were on strike (I didn't manage to find out why this teacher was striking, although I have a feeling that wasn't really important information). I was corrected when I learned that basically teachers can choose when they want to go on strike. It seemed a little convenient to me that the teacher was striking two days before the start of the two week holidays that start on Friday...

Other funny (non-strike related) things that I saw today:
A woman jogging. I haven't seen many women jogging here in Paris (I will even go as far as to say that this is the first female jogger that I have seen since we've been here. That's my excuse for not jogging. Really. That and it's too cold. I know. I'm a wimpy Canadian). Anyway. I'm on the subway on my way home from work, and a woman gets on the train. I notice her because she's wearing running pants, a white windbreaker, and a toque. A pink one. She sits with her eyes closed the whole train ride, and gets off at the same stop as me. As soon as she hits the platform, she starts jogging. Not real jogging, but the kind of 'running on the spot' jogging that one might do while waiting for the light to change. She does this 'jogging' all the way to the next metro line (no, she doesn't actually leave the station), where, upon noticing that the train has just left, proceeds to do some serious calf stretches. I thought this was hilarious. I guess it is possible to 'jog' across Paris, as long as you have a metro pass. To be fair, I don't know how far the woman had run before getting on the train, but I couldn't understand the logic of keeping the running going after 'sleeping' on the train for about 15 minutes! It's the newest workout, I guess. I'll see if I can fit it into my schedule. It's certainly warmer than running outside!