"Strike!"

I decided to ignore the current exchange rates and go ahead and plan a trip [ hopefully not the last but who knows ]. So today I decided to go out in search of a birthday present for Camille's mom and a travel guide for my trip. Unfortunately I didn't time it right and well, I was looking for n'importe quoi with basically every other person in all of Paris. Apparently, this strike is going to be pretty intense. It was originally supposed to start on Wednesday but it keeps being pushed up - now it officially starts Tuesday at 8. But on top of the total RATP strike [ so that means all of the suburban trains and all of the metro ], the SCNF strike [ all of the trains that run throughout the entire country ], and the buses [ probably ] ... students will be reinstating their strikes from last week [ they are striking against the governments desire to privitize university a little - make them pay at least something for their school ]. So the students are going to be joining in by blocking the train stations.
Needless to say, I'm not too thrilled about the idea of possibly dealing with no metro for the rest of the week. It will hopefully start working more starting on Thursday - but it will be very slow [ one train out of 5 at least ] and crowded, and annoying. At least they cancelled our classes on Wednesday. We have to make them up some Friday in the future but that's okay. Better than having to leave my apartment by 6 and walk all the way to school. So I get to enjoy a free day. Thanks strikers. Only Wednesday though. I don't want to walk to school Thursday.

In other news, I met a homeless hippie on the metro today [ or well he did all the talking ] who tried to convince me that he was Pope John Paul II's brother. Interesting. I can't say I really believed him but - he threw me a peace sign when he got off the metro. It was pretty classy.