Talkin with Grandma

Not mine. She and Marcia can't get skype to work. Someone needs to help them.

Instead, I opted for a surrogate grandma that I met at the park. She was watching her grandson and he and Ben played trains (I made him 2 short tunnels and one BIG tunnel) while I talked to her.

She apologized for all the protests and said that it was embarrassing. She greatly dislikes the president and called him some sort of naughty French word. Theirs, not ours. She loves ours and read his book.

She thinks the protests will die down next week, when the students go on vacation, and should hopefully peter out due to lack of momentum. She's hoping her flight back to Switzerland (she flies in to Paris to watch her grandson on the weekends and on other occasions, such as strikes leaving the kids with no school, then heads back to work) isn't canceled tomorrow. She says that if it is, she might still be able to take one of those bullet trains, two out of three are still operating; the strike shut down the third.

She informed me that these strikes happen once and sometimes twice a year and that this one is particularly nasty. She also told me the unions are exceptionally powerful here and the French work week (I'm not sure who all is represented by unions) is down to 35 hours. She gave me one of those, when I was younger... speeches and said she worked 70 hour weeks, like the 10 miles of unploughed uphill road my grandma had to walk through every day. I was duly fake impressed.

She says the strikes are what's making all the French people act grumpy. So far they've all seemed fairly nice to me, for the most part, and I told her so. She didn't believe me. I felt like I got into an argument with bugs bunny and I was daffy duck. It's duck season, now shoot!

That was the most interesting part of the day. Else wise all was the same. And Ben napped late yesterday and regular today, so that's good.