The big news in France today is the general strike that has been going on for the last day or so.
Somewhere between one and three million Frenchmen and Frenchwomen took to the streets in 200 French cities and towns yesterday to protest the current economic problems. How not working is supposed to help their economy kind of escapes me, but we'll ignore the politics of this for the moment.
As a result of the protests about a third of the flights out of Orly airport in Paris and 40% of the regional train schedule were cancelled. In addition about 10% of the nations electrical output was reduced.
The French seem to enjoy going on strike and they do it a lot. The last time a whole bunch of French folks went on strike was all of two months ago.
If there's a strike on while we're there, we're not likely to even notice it unless we run into a demonstration on the streets. French people adapt well to strikes and they tend not to shut down services that would keep tourists from coming to or enjoying their country.
For instance, during yesterday's strike, the Paris metro ran a full schedule and the international flights out of CDG weren't impacted.
Mass strikes like this usually begin genially and end up with young people throwing bottles at the cops while they fire tear gas back in return. Generally the protest culminates in the burning of a few random cars and everyone goes home happy. Yesterday was no exception to this general rule.
2 comments:
So what are the chances that the airlines will go on strike and we'll be stuck over there, for 3 more weeks??
We can only hope.
But the odds of that happening are pretty small. The last time international air travel to France was disrupted was when the Air France pilots went on strike and that was several years back.
Back in 2001, after 9/11, a lot of Americans got stuck in France (and all over the globe) for an extra week or more when air travel was shut down for several days and the backlog didn't get sorted out for a while.
I was in Miami on that fateful day and was stuck in a hotel room with nothing to do for several days.
Sounds great except I was nowhere near the beach and it rained the whole time.
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