Day 34567890 of the strike

So... classes are canceled for the rest of the week!

The situation on campus has gotten so bad that the school administration doesn't want the students or teachers being put in an danger so they decided to cancel class until the manifestations pass. Apparently about 380 school were blockaded yesterday in protest.

The protesters on campus physically barricaded the buildings on campus with whatever they could find. Mainly they used all the chairs and tables from inside the buildings and just stacked them up really high in front of all the entrances. I wish I had brought my camera because some of the stacks were ridiculously high but this picture will do. It's kind of hard to see but you can make out all the chairs stacked in front of the entrance.

One of the buildings has an outdoor stairway to get up to the second floor and there were chairs literally blocking the entire thing, it was ridiculous. Nobody was really doing anything about it though-- students were just standing there talking casually as if 100 chairs weren't physically preventing them from going into the classroom.

The only building on campus they didn't barricade was my building, the IEFE building (the foreign language center). So yesterday classes were still going on as usual, but the strikes are going to get worse today and tomorrow so they decided to cancel class. They are having a police force go onto campus this week to physically remove the protesters, but I don't think they're going to have too much luck with that.

The law to change the retirement age goes through either today or tomorrow so I'm not exactly sure just how bad things are going to get after it actually passes.


My friend posted a link to a cartoon making fun of the situation that is pretty funny. The question is asking if high school kids are being manipulated. The one kid thinks that the unions are distributing iPads to encourage kids to participate in the strike. Note the 'Twilight Forever' shirt on the left.

Basically, all the protesters are trying to rally up the high schoolers and even the middle and elementary school kids to help them blockade the tramways. It's just humorous because even the government noted that these kids are not affected by the reform at all. But the protesters are trying to manipulate and brainwash them to make the situation worse. Somehow someone got a hold of a bunch of high school kids' cell phone numbers and parents were worried because they were constantly getting texts to participate in the manifestations and blockades.

I'm hoping the SNCF, the train company, doesn't completely cancel trains once the law passes-- I don't think they're really allowed to do that. But they usually always have TGV runnings at least a couple times a day so I should still be able to get up to Paris on Friday!