C'est quoi la grève?

First of all, go watch this. (Here's the more-or-less comprehensible Google Translated version.) I heard it referenced many times here before actually hearing it play on the radio. Musical quality? Mediocre at best. But pretty hilarious because, well, so true.

Last semester's blogging was principally preoccupied with food. This semester, if I weren't too lazy to blog, it would all be about la grève. The word "strike" in English just doesn't carry the same weight of cultural connotations that grève seems to here. I can't count how many times since this strike started that people have told me striking is the national sport of the French. I have no trouble believing it. By all accounts, it's striking season - each year the revendications (demands, assertions, "this is what we're striking about") change, but come the third or fourth week of the spring semester and the striking begins. This turned out to be very accurate; most of my classes only met two or three times before being shut down by the strike.

It started, if I remember correctly, in the middle of my literature class - some of the students had held a general assembly that morning, and that afternoon the fire alarm went off during class. I didn't connect the two events until after we'd been shivering outside for half an hour and someone had got up on the steps to make a speech that I didn't entirely comprehend. It clicked when about half the students walked away in the direction of the bus stop rather than back to class, although my professor obstinately went back inside and finished her lecture through the continuing noise of the fire alarm.

It took about a week for all my classes to get shut down by the strike; classes in Letters and Languages went almost immediately, since its students were largely the instigators of the strike, as far as I can tell. Kinder observers will say that the liberal arts students are very socially conscious; most people will just call them anarchists. Whatever the case may be, they're a lot more invested in this than any of the other departments, and it's largely their fault that other faculties got shut down, since Letters and Languages students would go and "occupy" classes in other departments to dissuade them from taking place. In any case, it's been a full month since I've had a normal class week, though one math class obstinately continues to meet, even with only half its students, and the other has had fits and starts of trying to get back off the ground. At various times, both Letters and Languages and Mathematics have officially suspended classes for up to a week at a time, since even the professors had stopped showing up. I guess if they officially cancel classes it makes it administratively easier to make them up later.

At this point you're probably wondering what exactly they're striking about. Yeah, me too. As far as I can discern, there are three main reforms the government is trying to pass that people don't seem happy about. One has to do with the status of professor-researchers, and giving universities more power to evaluate them and establish how much teaching and how much research a given individual does. Another has to do with the way you become a teacher; currently you pass a competitive exam and go through a formation that's independent of the public university system, but the reform would make a teaching degree a master's program like other university degrees. The third has to do with how universities are funded; currently the government pays for pretty much everything and students pay a nominal enrollment fee, but some people want to let universities accept funding from private corporations.

My big questions, when I figured out that these were the issues, were: why are the students striking, when it seems like these reforms principally affect teachers and administrators? And how, as a student, do you even go on strike anyway? The rhetoric is pretty predictable. A lot of words like "solidarity" and "this is our future" and "corruption of the educational system." Everywhere you look are banners that say "university in danger." Here, education is free for students, which means that it's regarded as a right rather than a privilege. It's also extremely standardized, because if it's a right then everyone should have the same rights. Thus the resistance to evaluations of professor-researchers that would differentiate among them, privileging some, and the resistance to private funding, which might mean some universities or areas of study would be privileged over others. Basically, privilege is a dirty word here.

It all comes down to the free education system (which can apparently be traced back to a decision by the Catholic church, according to last semester's history class), which means that on the one hand, the government pays for everything, a system that may or may not be sustainable in the modern world (and especially the current economic climate), leading them to look for alternative sources of funding (though we'd never talk of actually asking the students to pay); and on the other hand, it creates a system where students can go on strike to protest such reforms, an idea that seems laughable to those of us who pay for our education. I would really love to tell a French student how much money I would have lost in the past four weeks if I'd stopped going to classes, just to see their jaw drop. Here, the worst that can happen is that they'd lose this semester, and since they're not paying anyway, it's much less of a big deal than it would be back in the U.S. - they can always repeat. Even so, since the students haven't been going to classes, the professors haven't been giving classes, bringing the university to a grinding halt and obliging it, by law, to make up the missed classes whenever the strike ends. Many of the professors I've talked to don't actually agree with the cessation of classes, even if they're against the reforms, but their position is "if the students don't want to have class, we won't have class." But they'll still make up the missed classes later. It boggles the mind, how docile they are. To all appearances, the students run this university.

We're now into week five and Middlebury has set up some replacement classes and tutorials for us, though in theory we're still supposed to be doing independent work for our "real" classes. Everything is fuzzy; we have no end date for the semester, since it may well be prolonged due to make-up classes; many of us still have no plane ticket home. It's certainly a point of cultural divergence with the American system, and not one I approve of nearly as much as the food...

Carbon Neutral for a Day

1. Click here: http://oneday.brighterplanet.com/users/4833/passes/public/WVT-S62
2. Put in your name and email. You are magically carbon neutral for a day (and by magically, I mean that Brighter Planet will donate an average day's worth of carbon offsets in your name)!
3. Pay it forward.

(The link is good for the first five people to click it.)

You can't rush art (or a French meal)

Nearly six hours ago, I sat down to lunch with about 25 French people, most of them related to my host dad, to celebrate Papy Claude's 80th birthday. After singing Happy Birthday - in English (apparently it's très à la mode) - we started the meal. First came the champagne and hors d'oeuvres (which aren't called hors d'oeuvres in French, as far as I can tell), then the cold salmon and white wine. That lasted maybe an hour. Then a break for collective singing of a 20+ verse song one of Papy Claude's sons had rewritten detailing his life story, which took easily 15 minutes to sing. Then came the main course (filet of duck with potatoes and green beans) and the red wine (I bowed out of the alcohol at that point - I'm not French enough yet), bringing us to the two-and-a-half hour mark or so. A pause for conversation, then cheese and salad (and more wine, of course - it was flowing freely at this point). Then more champagne with the cake...and chocolate, and cookies, and fruit. Four hours. Coffee and tea - at this point I was just sitting back and admiring the eating prowess of the people around me - four and three quarters. Christelle and I left to go pick up Nico from rugby practice and came back to find that the 60-and-up crowd had left...and the rest of the adults had pumped up the dance music and were bringing out more wine. We're at the six hour mark and they're still partying it up downstairs. I cannot but admire the sheer amount of energy they still have after the marathon meal. I'm not sure even the lengthiest Thanksgiving/Christmas/Easter dinners I've had at home could rival it. Personally, I'm exhausted, but well-fed and relaxed and quite ready to admit that the French may have something here with this cultural tradition. (Though in light of the dance music, my dissertation isn't looking like getting written tonight. :P)

Daily Bread

This weekend was the regional retreat for GBU, which was a lot of fun and very much like any other church retreat I've ever been on - very little sleep, not nearly enough showers for the number of people (really, churches should know better by now, they host these things all the time), lots of singing and Bible study and silly games (biblical trivia = excellent, except that all the names are different in French, which tends to be a problem). The biggest difference was that I have never spent that much time on meals at a youth retreat. I know I've already mentioned the sanctity of food in French culture, but really now. The buffet line is apparently just not something that's done. Even with 30-odd college students, we still set the table for every meal and laid out all the food in serving dishes. Thankfully we stopped just short of having one person serve everyone (which would have taken forever), though the curious resistance of the French to the serve-yourself mentality produced some hiccups in the dish-passing, with some people attempting to serve everyone around them as well. Really, I find it quite charming, it's just so different. The fare was pretty typical for big groups - spaghetti bolognese, grilled cheese sandwiches (albeit in the elaborated French version of croque-monsieur), rice and sausage and vegetables. And all quite excellent. No disasters like the infamous burnt scrambled eggs from one UM ARMY trip in high school. All in all, I think I like the food culture here. Just in case I wasn't already aware of that.

Also, another thing that is Just Not Done here: eating in cars. We left Friday night around 7:30 (or 19:30, if you prefer), for a three/four hour drive, so obviously there was eating to be done in the meantime. There were bags of sandwich-makings in the car, and our group was the last to depart, so I figured we would eat on the road. No. The other two cars stopped and waited for us at a Shell station (I was amused that they exist here too), and we went inside, sat down at a table, made sandwiches, and spent a good 45 minutes having dinner. You just can't rush these people with their food. Later in the weekend, discussing this curiosity with Christelle, I remarked that obviously there exist French people who eat in their cars, given the presence of the McDonald's drive-through. Oh no, she said, giving me a half-shocked, half-amused look, that's not what drive-throughs are for here. People pick up their food and take it home to eat. I mean, okay, so car culture isn't as big here - I haven't met anybody yet who lives in their car the way my family does at home (the minivan is more or less an extension of my mom's purse) - but still. On occasion, while doing errands, a hamburger in the car is not all that bizarre a concept. Except that yes, here it is. Vive les différences culturelles, I suppose.

Overview of Life

I have been shamefully neglectful of this blog of late. For a brief overview of the past week-ish:

• Church Sunday + meal after church = finally the kind of political interest I had been waiting for all week. Only nearly nobody was excited that Obama had been elected, given my church's extremely evangelical tendencies and the number of conservative American ex-pats it attracts. And during a crowded/noisy lunch with far too many people to have a real discussion is not the time to be practically alone in one's political/social convictions, especially if one lacks the necessary vocabulary to explain them adequately. And if one is being lectured to more than discussed with by overconfident French people. It was not ideal. Also, the French have the somewhat unfounded idea that they are not at all racist merely because they don't have the same history of slavery as America. In fact, France doesn't seem to be terribly diverse, and the Asians/Maghrebins/other people belonging to minorities I talked to in my church disagree quite strongly. So I did not appreciate being lectured about how the French are so open-minded in comparison to Americans when, excuse me, who just elected a black president?
• For your general-interest (well, if your general interests comprehend linguistics) reading: Verlan, a French slang formed by inverting words. It's pretty cool and basically American English sucks because we don't have any linguistically interesting argots that anyone actually uses. Also interesting: Louchébem, which is remarkably similar to Pig Latin, and Javanais, which is sort of like a language game in English whose infix I can't actually remember. (For all three articles, if you read French, check out the French versions - they're more complete.)
• Quote of the evening from dinner after yesterday's Bible study, while trying to explain Thanksgiving: "So it's kind of like a Bar Mitzvah?"
• This weekend: retreat with aforementioned Bible study group, at some church in Orléans, with all the other GBUs (Groupes bibliques universitaires) in the region. Which should be very fun, even though it will take three and a half hours to get there by car because we'll be taking the routes nationales, because apparently all the actually efficient highways are really expensive toll roads. Hurrah.