My Least Favorite French Word

Without a doubt, my least favorite French word (at least this week) is "une grève". It means "a strike" as in a worker's strike, and it's used entirely too frequently in the French language. This week, the workers of the RER B train line went on strike for the second time this fall. The RER B, unfortunately is the closest metro stop (Cite Universitaire is the name of the stop) to where I live. The next closest stop (Porte d'Orleans) is about a 15 minute walk or a 5 minute tram ride (but waiting for the tram usually takes about ten minutes, so they come out about even). The strike started this Monday, but thankfully I've had next to no classes this week, so I wasn't too affected by the strike for the first few days. Apparently the workers are up in arms because there is no longer a change in drivers at Gare du Nord, so now they have to go all the way to Charles de Gaulle (to me it seems like they just made the line more efficient, but apparently that's unacceptable). At any rate, the number of trains running on the line was cut by at least 50%, if not more, for the first few days. This has major consequences seeing as the RER B serves more than 800,000 commuters per day.

That is all merely background information to help set the stage for the tale of my one hour commute to class on Thursday morning. On Thursday mornings I have an 8:00AM class, which is atrocious enough for me, especially now that sunrise is around 7:55AM, but it's only once a week, so it's really not that terrible. Anyway, Wednesday night I checked the website Le Monde (newspaper with only about the 3rd widest circulation in France, but it with probably the largest international distribution) to get an update on the strike and read an article that said the unions were calling off the strike for the next day, so I assumed that meant I could follow my normal routine. So I show up at the RER station at 7:30ish, which is usually plenty of time, only to find out that the strike or "mouvement sociale" had not, in fact, stopped. However, the tv monitor in the station informed me that the next train was coming at 7:39, not too bad. So I decided to stay and wait for that train. Unfortunately, while I was standing there, the time on the monitor kept getting pushed back and pushed back, so by the time the train actually arrived, it was 7:46 - I was definitely going to be late for class...

But as the train pulled up, I realized I had another problem. The train was already bursting full. There was no way for me to cram myself into a car. All of us waiting on the platform just kind of looked at each other and ran back and forth looking for any doorway that had even the tiniest free space. Nothing. So the train left, having gained possibly 5 passengers from our platform (turned out one of those lucky 5 was a girl in my class who recognized me). The next train was scheduled to come in 3 minutes, so I made the admittedly poor choice of waiting for that train, figuring that if it was coming so soon after the other one, it would be less crowded. In hindsight, this was extremely poor logic on my part. It was just as impossibly full. So, at 7:55 I finally gave up on the RER B and ran outside, only to have just missed a tram... At this point, I was strongly considering giving up on going to class, but classes are 2 hours long, I was already awake, and I wanted to go to the library after class, so I waited 5 minutes for a tram, got to the metro at Porte d'Orleans, at which point I still had 10+ metro stops to wait through. I got to class at 7:30, just as the student presentation portion of class ended, which was ideal. I talked to the professor afterward and he was really understanding - basically he said as long as we got there before 9:45, he'd count us as present. What a lovely man.

Thus, "la greve" is not one of my favorite French words at the moment...