Mais euh! Il en a marre!

Argh. Let me repeat. Being on strike and not doing your job. Fine. Being "on strike" and stopping others from doing their jobs by sabotaging everything. Not fine. Marseille and its region seem to suffer about 10 times more than all the other places in the country. Starting from yesterday four out of the five bus depots are blocked and that means that there are only two or three bus lines working in the whole city and there are no trams and only one metro line is working normally. That's lovely, really. My mother works on the other side of town and usually she has to take a bus and then the metro down at Rond Point du Prado. Without any buses and limited metros, bonjour the battle to make it in! Starting this morning the Marseille airport is blocked and people just leave their cars on the side of the highway and attempt to walk to the airport for kilometers in the hopes of catching their flight. About half the flights are cancelled and the petrol depot that provides kerosene for the planes is now also closed so that means soon not a single plane will leave. This situation actually is a repeat of what happened in multiple airports yesterday. It's quite amazing that people just leave their cars and hope for the best. [update: apparently the police came and those who were blocking the airport decided to leave rather than fighting it off, the petrol problem still exists though] Now SNCF, they're also lovely. Apparently in most of France there are one out of two commuter trains running. Commuter trains from Marseille? We still have the same amount of trains as last week and that means about a quarter of them running, the last one being at 5:50pm. If you finish after that, you're damned screwed to go back home if you live in one of the small cities on the line. The trash hasn't been picked up in over a week and now they're complaining that the army got called in to help get rid of the mountains of trash in the city center? They're saying it's stopping them from "being on strike". Nope, that's just saving everyone from catching diseases and seeing rats everywhere. In normal times you can easily see rats the size of cats in the city center of Marseille (but it's still a lovely city, we just have to deal with small furry neighbours) but these days they should have multiplied like rabbits and be the size of huge dogs. SNCF bis. I'm supposed to go see my sister in Toulouse this week-end. Normally the train system in France is rather decent for long distance travel. In four hours I can make it to Toulouse... I know in some other countries people consider it normal to drive 400km to see a relative, I'm not driving that kind of a distance if there is a perfectly good train line. The chances of my actually making it to her place are limited right now. Next week I'm supposed to go up to Paris now my chances of making it there are a bit higher but still I'm not sure to have the train I reserved and if I don't get the train I reserved that means I won't have a reserved seat and I might have to stand for the whole 3 hours and some minutes. Apparently there is no petrol problem, or so we're told. Except we're still in the USSR times where you develop reflexes to spot the petrol trucks and which petrol station they've come to fill up and if they've come with the 95/98 that you need. I won't mention the exasperation I face whenever I read or hear interviews of those blocking and demonstrating. If I had a penny every single time they contradict themselves or cannot even point out why the heck they're on strike, I would be able to fully pay for a trip to Singapore. If I wanted to be mean I would claim that these people just enjoy being against something. Having faced rather major transport strikes and petrol strikes and trash strikes in Marseille multiple times, it's still hard. They're all at once and it's just really getting exhausting. The one that kills me is the transport one, we haven't had one like that in years! Usually it's the drivers that randomly go on strike, you can have perfectly good service in the morning and then they decide to shut everything down during the day and you're screwed to come back home. This time they won't even let the drivers not on strike, which is the vast majority of them, get to their buses and take them out! Talk about being dicks! So there, my little POV typed up in the train, while watching the sunrise (pictorial proof above, c'est beau!). Fun times, fun times. Overall I can't help but think that it could be worse because the riots have been limited for the moment, some things still function and apparently a good part of the country is living perfectly normally... it's just that in the south people are really hot blooded and they love having conflicts which escalate. The way international press sees this thing is also quite funny. Many papers write that the French appear very selfish with this uprising, and in a way it's absolutely true. ( because this was kind of funny )

Day 351

Day 351 - 21.10.10

Colour for dinner.