These French!

Ever since my blog readership in Russia has increased, so has the amount of smutty emails arriving hourly in my email box. Very disturbing. People want me buy strange medicines I never knew existed. And why are people in Russia reading a travel blog about a French pig anyway?

I discovered the STATS key on the blog, and I can hardly do anything but watch it and report the results to Hunt.

Karen: I have a reader from Denmark!....Hey, 62 pages were read this week in Russia!...But right now no one is reading anything at all!

Hunt: Karen, it is 4:00 in the morning.

Karen: It's not 4:00 in Russia!

But it is strange about those Russians.

I called the airline yesterday to try to change our return flight from Paris to Barcelona, because this French stike is still going on, and gasoline is still hard to find. But the hard-hearted employee at the so-called “help” desk told me to FORGET IT, or words to that effect. I promised to name our first-born after him and he quipped, “Your date of birth is listed right here.” So I offered the first grandchild. No go.

It looks like we'll be flying from Paris if we fly at all. Apparently no international flights have been cancelled. Planes just depart from Paris empty because all of their would-be passengers who have abandoned their cars in the long lines at Parisian service stations and rolled those suitcases along the highways just cannot run fast enough. I am not making this up. I have seen newsclips.

One-fourth of the service stations are closed in France and 30% of the stations around Paris are closed due to strikers. And why? Because the French government wants to reform the pension by increasing the retirement age all the way to 62. Why that is a whole 2 years higher than it is now! The nerve.

I am particularly moved by the number of high school-aged strikers I have seen on the news. I remember how worried I was in high school about getting old and not knowing how I would make ends meet a mere 50 years hence. My friends and I would gather together after the football game on Friday nights and sit around drinking our vanilla-cokes lamenting, “What will become of us?” My heart goes out to these sensitive French kids who are so upset they are burning down their schools!

While our son was studying abroad in France for a semester we were regularly surprised how often he was on break. “I thought you had a two-week vacation two weeks ago.” “We did. But these French need plenty of time off to plan their next strike.”

These French.