Back to grève!
So my first class at Paris 8 after the break was scheduled for today. Note I don’t say that I had class today; the strike was in effect much more comprehensively than before. I took pictures, of course; not like there was anything else to do. Well, except for the sudoku in the Metro Paris. I pick up a free paper just about every time I’m at the St-Denis campus, and tell myself that I’m going to do the crossword and build my language skills, but then I always give up on it and turn to the sudoku instead. On the bright side, I’m getting better at sudoku… Anyway, pictures were taken, by me, but before I get to them, here’s some utterly random pictures that I took sometime in the past week, and forgot about till I uploaded stuff from my camera today. These were taken in various neighborhoods, don’t remember entirely which are from where:
First the sculptures:
Now the façades:
Now the doorways etc:
I’ve noticed I take a lot of pictures of doorways. But then Paris has a lot of fun ones.
Anyway, about the grève. As usual, there were chairs and tables in the entranceway and all that. This time, however, the students seem to have gotten the idea that there’s a difference between tossing a few chairs about and really blockading a place. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a proper barricade:
and:
I’m quite proud of the French students. They can learn! It finally occurred to someone, apparently, that scattered blocked or mostly-blocked doorways are annoying at most, but that since the entrance lobby only has point connecting in to the rest of the school–the stairs and the doorways shown above–it would be a lot simpler to just completely block those off. Isn’t that clever?
I was tempted to turn around and go back to the dorms right then, but I figured I ought to at least try to get to the classroom. My Tuesday-morning professor, for Comprehension and Analysis of Texts, isn’t as self-righteous as my grammar teacher is about continuing class despite the strike; her attitude is a bit detached, really (it should be noted that none of my professors seem to care much for Sarkozy’s reforms; they just differ on their opinions of the strike). Still, it seemed only polite to do my best to show up; that way, at least, I’d be prepared for grammar class on Thursday, where the professor routinely berates students for claiming the barricades as an excuse for tardiness (in fairness to her, anybody with a modicum of sense should know by now to allow extra time, especially on Thursdays, to navigate the crowds and figure out which spots are blocked and so on). In any case, I remembered the out-of-the-way path some of us MICEFA students had taken exiting Bâtiment A on our registration visit (we weren’t being particularly exploration-minded; we’d simply gotten lost). So I went across the street, and arrived at a gate that was devoid of students, and in the process of being unlocked by some nice custodian-type people. So in I went, through the courtyard pictured below, which I realized I’d never gotten a good picture of from that angle:
There followed forty-five minutes of me doing sudoku, reading the headlines and horoscopes, and cross-hatching/shading the Metro logo (I got a nice plaid thing going with the wireframe globe icon). At the end of which the classroom was still somewhat bereft of studentry:
(the thing on the table on the left-hand edge is my backpack. There was no other sign of life)
So I went on my merry way, snapping pictures. I noted that other doorways were devoid of blockading:
Well, not all. The one below, leading to the bridge over the road, had some halfhearted chair-and-desk stuff going on:
The garden’s coming along nicely too:
And then I got back to the courtyard where I’d come in, and found that the students had apparently discovered that people can actually go in and out through the gates. They had thus amended their deployment accordingly:
There was a guy with keys (the gentleman to the left with the shoulder bag, I believe), but apparently none of them were the right one for the gate. The student on the other side advised him to find a security guard.
I went to go to the cafeteria building across campus, where there’s a gateway to the sidewalk. Well, I believe there is, without a lock that requires a key, just a push-button thingy. But the building was, naturally, closed; I think it opens around 10:30 or 11:00. In the end, I got to the far end of campus (which really isn’t that far), and saw a group of people walking down a driveway and noticed that the gate (pictured below) was slowly closing.
So I dashed for it, which felt very Mission: Impossible until I actually passed through with moments to spare, and instead of closing dramatically behind me and sealing off the campus, the door motion-sensed me and started reopening. Ah well. Noted student presence/barricades along other gates as well:
And here’s a whole great big bunch of people outside the lobby:
And that’s about it. Oh, and this morning the sky was melodramatic outside my window, so I took a picture:
Yes, I take a lot of melodramatic shots of the sky when it’s all gray except for indistinct light in the distance. It’s pretty.
Oh, and here’s a picture of the other side of the stair barricades:
A couple people gave me funny looks when they noticed me on the other side. Didn’t mean to rain on their parade or anything–because really the whole thing was relatively impenetrable and they deserve to be proud of their little strategic-location quality-not-quantity breakthrough–but, you know, it makes a good picture.
Tomorrow, I think, I’ll have some notes on contact-lens solution and a too-long analysis of some graffiti that is either juvenile and earnest or cryptic and ironic.
