strikes (grèves)

I realized while reading an article on the strikes taking place in France that I had yet to describe them in my blog.   So here's a quick summary of what's happening:  France has a maximum age at which people retire legally.  From then on they receive retirement payments that support them more or less until the end of their lives.  Currently, President Nicholas Sarkozy and the majority of the National Assembly have created a law raising the national age of retirement from 60 to 62.  This has happened three other times in the past 20 years.  The major strike movements have risen from the transportation and oil refinery unions, which obviously effect the economy in a serious way on a day-to-day basis.  This is a nation-wide movement to maintain the current retirement age, and by that I mean college and high school students have joined the strikes by closing or blocking the schools.  For the majority of them, the rise in retirement age means less open jobs when they get their diplomas.  However, the rise in retirement age also means less people to pay for that will reach the retirement age.  Lots of gas stations are running low on gas now, with some of them limiting the amount of gas you can purchase.  The trucking industry pulled some interesting moves, deciding to drive really slow in one long line on the highways causing both traffic and late arrival of their product.  The recent protests in Lyon were apparently violent, with storefront windows broken and a high school set on fire.  The president has addressed these issues by saying that the protestors didn't have the right to take hostage those who didn't have anything to do with the situation and interrupt their daily lives.  He also said that the people who are breaking things won't have the last word in "this democracy, this republic."

The majority of people talk about how the demonstrations affected their trip to school or work.  I had that experience a few times now, where the tram was blocked from the center of town and I had to walk to school, but luckily I don't live too far from the majority of places I need to go. A lot of people are worried about gas and the next time they're going to get it, but again, way less people use gas on a daily basis here in Bordeaux.  Today I went to school, but the professors decided to go on strike and not have classes.  The police were stationed in the center of town, with shoulder pads, batons, and guns (and stern faces).  In terms of responses to the rise in retirement age, most of the students in my classes don't give me a straight answer about whether they are for or against the change in law.  But according to reports I've been reading in the NY Times and Le Monde, the polls show that the majority of people support the strikes.  I don't really know what that means.  I guess time will tell if people really support the strikes.  A lot of people are surprised by the presence of high schoolers in the streets during the protests.  Aunt Melissa and I talked a couple nights ago, and she was unhappy that a certain political party had encouraged the high schoolers to participate in the strikes.  I think the majority of high schoolers were participating because a) they got out of school and b) because they got to be rebellious.  When I saw them today at the center of town, they were saying completely unnecessary things to the cops like, I'm going to move that way now, and you can't stop me.  It was stupid.

For me, it's been interesting to ask the french people about the strikes, and to try to get a collective perception of the movement while not really being connected to it in a serious way.  Sure, I did experience the inconveniences of the lack of trams today, but it made me realize how fast I move normally, and how I expect to move that pace everyday.  At dinner tonight, one of the women who lives in this house from Monday to Thursday told us about how she arrived at work on Tuesday at Bordeaux 3, the liberal arts university.  The buildings were blocked, and the university president told everyone it wasn't worth it to try to work that day.  She said this in a somewhat cheerful manner, but also in a way that was implying she wanted to make it sound serious like there was a confrontation she encountered.  After that, she drove home she said, and enjoyed her day without work.  No one really tries to force their way into a place when people are blocking it.  When we were protesting the rise in public education last semester, there were plenty of students who tried to forcefully make their way through Sather Gate.  Here, people seem to accept the strikes easily, not focusing on the inconvenience that a particular aspect of society had taken a break for the day.

presentations

this week I gave two presentations in my classes on neurological modeling and "language and memory," my first presentations in french.  for the most part, they went well, it was just frustrating to feel like I was presenting adult information with the diction choices of a child.  A couple times I just stopped mid-sentence, not knowing how to express something, but everyone in the class was very understanding.  We did a presentation on OCD patients and their reactions in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex after learning something without errors and with errors.  It was interesting, but I wasn't too interested in that type of research.  The other paper was on synesthesia and memory, testing to see if they have superior memory for the stimuli that elicit the synesthetic responses.  It was especially interesting for me to work in a group with people in French, trying to express my feelings about whether an idea or topic should be in the presentation or not, or trying to suggest that they express a particular idea differently.  We use very nuanced language for that type of comment, in any language, and I found myself struggling not to sound like a jerk.  The simple words don't let people know that you care about their ideas or feelings.

I've bought my tickets for Prague next weekend, so this Friday I head to Paris where I'll take a flight Saturday morning to the Czech Republic.  I've been reading up on the history of the city, and I was completely unaware of all the craziness that city has been through over time.  If any of you reading this have suggestions about things to see/do/eat/drink there, don't hesitate to leave me a comment about it.  I'm looking for a place to stay on couchsurf.org, but having some trouble with responses.  I'm sure I'll find something, and if not, I can always stay in a hostel of sorts.

Today, me and Alex Spence went with Erika to the vineyard where I worked two weekends ago.  We worked about 2 hours, much less than last time, and had another wonderful lunch full of wines. Alex is another Californian from Venice Beach, we've been hanging out and swappin music from time to time.  Dylan, he, and I went to Mundaka, Spain last weekend to visit and (for Dylan) to surf.  The town is truly in Basque country there, beautiful green hills on all sides, all the signs in the native Basque language, and consistent grey clouds above. We slept in Dylan's car and had a great adventure hiking around and seeing a small part of Spain for the day.  Then we drove into San Sebastien for a couple hours, which was nice to see again.  It's too bad it's been cloudy both times I've gone there, I feel like it would be absolutely gorgeous when it's sunny outside.  I tried speaking Spanish with an old man there, but failed, which was really sad for me to feel incapable in a language I once spoke well "enough".  It's ok though.

Blind Pilot, a band I suggest to EVERYONE, played at Berkeley yesterday on campus.  I was bummed to miss it, but found on facebook this morning that Kelsey Westphal (a super-duper friend) had asked the band to say Bonjour jake while she filmed it on her iPhone.  I was so excited.  I miss my friends from Berkeley from time to time, I miss the city and the ambiance there.  But I'm torn I guess, because every time I respond to someone who askes me "How long are you here for?" I hesitate before answering December.  It's really not that far away now, I'm past the half way point of my trip.  Also I can see the effect it has on people to find out that this person is very impermanent in their lives.  It's too bad, but I understand why it's not as "attractive" for a person to want to make friends with someone who will leave in two months.  That said, I'm going to a birthday party for a girl in my class in Lacanau when I get back from Prague.  I was so excited to be invited to her place for that, and just in general I was excited to be included in this small community of my class in Bordeaux.

vendanges

I did more squats today than I have ever done in my entire life.

About a week ago, Erika (my host mom) asked us all if we'd like to go help with the vendanges (harvest) on a vineyard where her friends lived.  I was so stoked at the idea of working on a vineyard, but unfortunately as the week progressed I became more and more sick.  Today we woke up at around 730 for the 830 start on the vines, so I was pretty tired on top of being sick.  The chateaux is out on the right side of the Garonne, it's called Chateaux Montjon, and the family has a beautiful property.  There's an enormous mansion made out of stone and designed by the same architect that designed the Grand Théâtre in the centre of town.  The sun came up as we began our work, crouching down with a basket and clippers and cutting off huge bunches of little purple grapes, swollen after months of ripening on the vine.  We worked in twos, one on each side of the row, so I got to know a lot of the family's friends as we clipped grapes.  I worked with an older man named Terme, who talked with me at lunch about his thesis on french contemporary history and islam, which was really interesting but hard to follow from time to time.  There were around 20 of us total, and we worked until 1:30 with a break for coffee around 11:30.  By 1:30 I was really feeling the soreness in my back and thighs, this being the first serious exercise I've done since... honestly I can't remember.  The meal they prepared for us was delicious, and we drank all these old wines throughout the meal.  They kept serving more and more wines, while they brought out baked potatoes and cheeses and chocolate cakes.  The wine was apparently "good" wine, but I couldn't tell you one way the or the other.  I do know that the more aged wines were not as flavorful as I imagined they would be.  We had a couple wines from 1973 and 1984, but I didn't really see why they were worth more.  I learned a lot about how they grow the grapes though, so I didn't leave the vineyard completely uncultured.  When we started up again on the vines, I had enough wine in my tum to make it enjoyable (or at least I was able to ignore the pain in my knees.)  They had apple trees and hazelnut trees, and baled hay in the fields next to the vineyards.  It was absolutely beautiful, I'm thinking I'm going to go back in two weeks to help with the next vendanges.

As for my classes, they're going really well (in other words, I'm starting to understand my lectures), and I turned in the first part of my artificial intelligence project yesterday.  The program MASS (applied mathematics to social sciences) has a cognitive science division that is actually pretty cool.  The student association for MASS had a soirée the other night, and I was invited to someone's apartment for a party before we went out to the bars.  I was so stoked when they asked me to hang out, I wasn't sure how the students would be in my classes at first.  The fact that we're together everyday really helps, because I see the same people each day.  It's a bit like high school in that sense, and in the sense that everyone knows everyone else, which is weird to me.  I'm used to university where you go into a class and know maybe 2-3 people, and you meet new people as a result.  But this actually works out in my favor, so that's fine.

I'm hoping to go London to see Sylvain in the coming weeks, and maybe get to Berlin to see some friends, but it's a little difficult from Bordeaux.