Strikes, more Strikes, and Travel

I don’t even know where to start, it’s been so long since my last update—but if I don’t do it now, it’s never going to happen. Readers digest version of the last part of my Fall semester:

The Wednesday after I got back from Greece, I headed to my class at the university to find that the students who had been occupying the building and handing out information in opposition to a new law about university reform in the works had taken things a step further and were now going on strike and blocking the university. They pulled chairs and desks out of classrooms and into hallways and blocked the doors that they could. I found my professor (smoking outside, of course) and asked him what I should do with the paper I was supposed to turn in that day, dropped it off to the department secretary, and headed off.
The next morning when I tried to go to my history class, it was the same situation. And then the next week. And the next. The week after, I gave up on making the trip across town just to turn right back around, but I didn’t miss anything. Two weeks ago, classes had theoretically started again. Monday, on our way to translation, we ran into a group of American students from the earlier class, telling us to give up and go home. Some of the students on strike had come into their classroom while they were having class, and pulled their desks and chairs away from underneath them. They then proceeded to occupy the building, making as much noise as possible to prevent any classes from taking place. I hung out and observed for a while… then went home. Thursday, I went to class, but since there wereless than 20 students out of a lecture of a couple hundred, the professor decided not to have class.
This week, our last week, I finally had my classes again, but it was pointless. In my comparative literature class, we had met 4 times (4 weeks), and not met for 7, taking into account that the professor was gone for a meeting the week before fall break. We had only discussed one book out of the four we were going to read. This week we breezed through one more and started on the third… Thankfully, for each of these classes my grade was based on only one assignment, which I managed to get and turn in without too much trouble (and I passed, woohoo!).

Outside one of my lecture halls, décor à la strike

In the meantime, I still had my two classes at the IES center, except for that one time the transportation workers were on strike and my professor couldn’t get a train to come into town. Oh yes. And I ended up missing my Friday class two weeks in a row because of fantastic adventures…what can you do? Thanksgiving week, I headed to Florence to visit Ali, one of my best friends, who’s studying there for the semester. She even saved me a plate of Thanksgiving dinner from her school’s potluck :-) We went to Siena for a day (beautiful), hung out in Florence, ate pizza and pasta and gelato and had some cappucinos, and went to Pisa and took some silly pictures with the tower. Italy was beautiful, and it was so nice to see Ali and see her mad Italian skills, and to pretend to speak Italian myself as well. It was wonderful, and I survived all the traveling by myself with no problems.

Ali and I, and some more off-season tourists in front of the Ponte Vecchio in FlorenceYou all know what it is... doesn't it look fake?

I got back Sunday night, then worked like mad Monday through Wednesday to turn in two papers (aka, the majority of my work for this semester), and then left bright and early Thursday morning to head to Stockholm with a friend from IES. We had talked early in the semester about wanted to go to Sweden, and we found round trip plane tickets for less than 30 euros total, so we had to do it. (fine print: the airports were for low-cost airlines, so we had to take a bus from Paris to the airport and then the airport to actual Stockholm, each of which cost more than the one-way plane trips, and we had to take a train to Paris just to get there…the tickets for which I bought twice because the first ones didn’t come in the mail on time… oh yeah, there was a post office strike as well… but it was still a good deal). We were scheduled to land at around 4:30 pm, and I’ll never forget looking out the plane window when we started descending and seeing city lights from above and asking, “um, why is it nighttime out there?” Needless to say, by the time we landed it may as well have been the middle of the night. We caught our bus, got to the train station, bought transportation passes, and traveled to and found our hotel with almost no difficulty. (Swedish for travelers = English. We only met one person who didn’t seem to be completely fluent). Our hotel was lovely; we stayed in a “quick-sleep” room on the inside, with a bunk-bed and no windows, which had a flat-screen TV nonetheless. The only downside was the shared restroom facility, with locker room-style communal showers and no curtains to speak of. We managed to work in a shower a piece by going at off hours and blocking the door for the other person…haha. We also went in the sauna, which was nice.

The Vassa-- a Swedish warship from the XVII century that sunk and was discovered and brought to the surface 50 or so years ago

A Christmas market in old-town Stockholm

Stockholm by ... afternoon

I loved Stockholm, it’s a really gorgeous city, really clean… It was cold, but dry for the most part with the exception of one night (when we decided to take random busses around town with our transportation pass, then the wind broke my umbrella…) We left our hotel before 8 am Sunday morning to catch the train to the central station, and caught our bus to the airport, got on our plane, and about an hour after started experiencing some serious turbulence, which continued for at least an hour. My first time on record getting motion sickness on an airplane. The pilot announced a couple hours into the normally 2 and a half hour flight that we weren’t going to be able to land in Paris because the wind on the runway was too strong for our aircraft, so we got diverted to Lille – in northern France. We landed 45 minutes late, about 2 and a half hour drive away from our original destination, which still wasn’t even central Paris. Needless to say, we missed our train back to Nantes by a longshot. The airline bussed us to the airport in the boondocks, where we took another bus to Paris, where we took the metro to the train station, where I bought my third train ticket for the return trip from Paris to Nantes, for a later train because it was a bit cheaper, and I ended up home at about 1 am. We never even got to eat lunch. I think my travels that day deserve to be re-stated:

Train (hotel to central station)
Bus (to the airport)
Plane (to…Lille)
Bus (Lille to airport)
Bus (airport to Paris)
Metro (bus station to train station)
Train (to Nantes)
Tram (to the night bus station)
Bus (to my house)

Oy.

Fast forward to the present: I had two finals Friday and have another on Tuesday, then Friday I’m headed home for Christmas :-) It's hard to believe the semester is basically over already. It feels like the day I got here was forever ago, but it went by really fast at the same time.

I’ll come back to Nantes January 8th, and then who knows… classes don’t start again until the 21st.
Good luck with exams (if you have them), safe travels, and Joyeux Noël!