Marche du Pâque

Heeelllllooooo everybody,

Sorry this has taken me so long. I have been crazy busy lately, and not had hours and hours to sit and wait for the computer to work.

Things are still going well. Last night I did an easter walk. It was a thing that was organized by youth groups in Savoie. Even though I'm not in a youth group I really wanted to do the walk, so I did. Its just such a cool idea. We walked all night.

We started out at 6pm. Had a little welcome and all that, then walked a bit and went to a mass. We ate dinner and at about midnight and then we started to walk. We did so till 6 am, stopping every hour or so for tea and hot chocolate. We walked from town to town, crossing a valley, throughout the course of the night.

It was a really cool experience. We walked through lots of really little old towns and tonnes of old buildings, all 150 of us, carring torches. It was so pretty to watch the procession curving ahead of me, 150 little flames lighting up the road and buildings. I met some really really cool people and had lots of good talks along the way.

And then it rained. At 2am it started to rain, and it rained soo hard. We were all soaked. completely. After that it was FREEZING cold. Not really pleasant, but, well, er.... not very pleasant. There really is no "but" to that one.

Four hours later, we finally got to the ending town and had breaky. I peeled off all of my soaked clothing, with the exception of my tee shirt, rung out what water I could, and tried to soak all the heat from my bowl of tea. And then we took the bus home.

When I got home, I struggled to keep awake in the hot shower just long enough to warm myself up without drowning, then slept until 4 pm. A clear sleeping record for me.

It was a pretty cool thing. It was kind of like running a marathon. People are like, "Why would anyone want to put themselves through that?" But walking all night in the pouring, freezing rain, fighting off sleep is just my idea of a good time. Its an experience that doesn't come up very often.

It makes your bed feel better than it has ever felt before, it builds caracter and after you can say you finished. Doing stuff like this forces me to have time to let my thoughts wander to things they normally wouldn't, to break out of the routine, and to meet really cool people along the way.

In other news, on thursday I'm heading off for my european tour, so if you call or email me during the next two weeks, I won't be there.

Lastly, I can't send email from this comp. I have yahoo and it doesn't recognize the "send" and "delete" etc buttons. I can read my emails but not sent them, so just a side note to Darren, (I hope you read this, or someone *please and thank you* from rotary lets you know the info is here) the "hotel du bon coin" was bought out and turned into condos, according to the tourism office in Chamonix, so you'll have to find a different hotel when you go there. Its no longer open.

Well ladies and gen , thats all I have to say,
talk to you all soon, or maybe not so soon, with the internet connection like it is, but in any case miss you all
A plus!!

My Chambery Adventures - Profiter à fond

Hi everyone, so I hope you all can read this this time.

As some of you may know, there is another canadian at my school in my class for three months. Her name is Michelle, and she's really fun, and nice. Because we both live really really far away, so far that there is only one bus in the morning at 8:00 and one bus at night at 6:00 we have nothing to do in the mean time. We don't have homework, or tests to study for, so we decided to do what we came here for. Learn other stuff. Go to museums, sites etc. We went to the office of tourism, got a list of things to do, and made a full out, hard core tourist schedual. Because Michelle is an amazing writer, and has much better grammer than me, I'm going to just insert what she wrote about our mad adventures. At museums.

here we go......................

"The past three days I have soaked up culture like a sponge. Making productive use of my 19 hours per week of free time during school, Bonnie and I visited 3 stops on our 3 week long tour of Chambery - doing it the way tourists do. While yes, we are tourists, we're here for an extended stay which upgrades our status to that of the 'semi-permanent citizen', and we have to make that special effort to take full advantage of all that Chambery has to offer.
The first stop on our tour began at La Musée des Beaux Arts, a museum of art very near to our school. I was awestruck as I walked through the gallery, the paintings had been painted 500 or more years ago. I have never been within inches of something that old. Someone had conveyed a message that lasted 500 years, and now I was on the recieving end. It blew my mind.
Thursday brought the the trip to La Musée d'Histoire Naturelle de Savoie. I'm glad I arrived without expectations, because if I had, this museum would not have filled them. It consisted of 4 rooms: shells, minerals, animals, and insects. All of the rooms had very little to do with Chambery. Even if they had, it was not explained. There were cases of shells and mineral rocks with labels indicating they came from Afghanistan, Brazil, and on occasion Savoie. The insect room really was no better, showcasing Monarch butterflies from Canada that migrate to Mexico every winter. Who's brilliant idea was that?
The animal room was by far the most entertaining. I was horrified and sad to see a room filled with dead, stuffed animals. There were angry foxes, snakes in coils, eagles with their wings spread, and a mountain goat too. So after Bonnie and I finished being shocked, we pulled out the camera, posed with some of the animals, and had a good laugh over how ridiculous the museum was. Then we got the hell out of there.
Friday allowed us to experience the bus system first hand. We took a city bus to La Maison d'Energies - a house built to run solely on solar power. At first we ended up in the wrong place, about 10 minutes too far from where we wanted to go. After arriving, we had a private tour with a very informative guide, and learned about the placement of windows, solar panels, natural insulators, cooking using the sun's rays, and gardens on the roof.
Making our way home was not so pleasant. We got lost on the bus, ended up at the opposite end of town from where we wanted to go, I left my coat at a bus stop and had to go back to find it, took another bus, used 5 bus tickets, and FINALLY arrived at the city centre.
Nevertheless, our day was hilariously fun and informative. And now, I look forward to the last 2 weeks, of our Chambery Adventure."

Thanks Michelle. Since then, this week we have already gone to a Museum of the area, where we saw artifacts from as old as the years 0 or 100 or so av JC. There was also a really big section about world war two. Chambery was bombed a few times during operation Overlord, and there was a lot of people in the resistance movement from here. It was really interseting.

This morning, we went a did a visit or the Cathedrale in town, and then stopped at the city hall to gather free Chambery souvenirs.

We are THE best tourists ever. Tommorow we have a guided tour or the town and the town castle in the afternoon.

I can just feel the culture radiating from us.

GGGGGRRRRRRRRRR In capitals

I strongly dislike computers now. I still can't figure out the stupid font thing. So I just took it off my blog. Too bad for it.

I other news, the CPE has been taken back. Kaput. Its over. However the french are still protesting, but this time, against wolves.

Yes thats right, wolves.

During the last 300 or so years, hunters have killed off lots of wolves. Now with all the protection laws, wolves are coming back and the shepards in the mountains are NOT happy.

Yesterday they showed up, about 100 of them, with their sheep in front of the court house, and protested. Against wolves.

In my french class for foreigners, we talked about it and we all had a laugh, so much so that I actually cried. My prof, totally in stitches, goes " This isn't done in Canada?"

People hardly protest at all in Canada, but to think.
Wolves.

Bravo.

My friend the cow

Outside of my window lives 8 cows. We made friends. I ran in their field yesterday.

I moved on sunday, to the country.

Where people have real goats, really milk them, and then make cheese with that milk.

Today I don't have school (thank you CPE) and I spent all day laying in the sun, writing a play in french. With the dog.

The internet here is PAINFULLy slow, and I can't figure out how to upload pics yet, so I may not have any for a while.

Anyway, its been beautiful in the sun. Running in the soft green field, it felt like a movie.

This is just a little update and a test to make sure this post will post.

Here goes nothing

Bye!

What the french are talking about- CPE

Its been 4 weeks since the last vacation. Of those three weeks, there has been about one full week where I've had normal classes. Maybe.

Yesterday morning I got up went to school and instead of having classes, we had a vote whether we would have classes or not. We voted no. 652 voted for to 243 who voted against. (I was shocked!!) We Protested.

When I got there the vice principal was running around looking stressed out, not because he wanted the students to go back to class, but because there wasn't enough papers for the people to vote on. He ran and got the ballot boxes and with the principle and other administration people they counted the votes. Blockus.

The french are on strike. Full out. The government isn't listening, so they continue. The CPE, has been THE subjet of conversation for just about a month. Its incredible. Last tuesday there was a national strike and I was down town shopping. We walked into the stores, and there was no electricty. Strikers have even started to block the highways.

Jaque Chirac, the President, spoke last night. The news totally got cut out, and just before he spoke, there was a grand, "da da da.. a message from the presdent" with the french flag in the back ground. It was pretty serious. He said that he would reduce the law so that you could only work under the CPE contract for a year, and that when and if you get fired, the employers have to provide a reason. Still the opposition is NOT happy and there were more stikes today, and another big one on tuesday.

Half the universities in France are currently in a state of "blockus" no one gets in or out. In Paris there has been students who have locked themselves in their university for a few days and nights.

And my opinion-

The CPE might not be so bad because the "idea" is that any young person who is taken under this contract is going to be undereducated. Its for little jobs where the employer might only need someone for a few months, to wash dishes, carry crates or what ever.

The idea is that really educated people wouldn't be hired under this contract, that they could get a stable job in a company that needed them. Because there is so much umemployment for young people if the rules make it easier for bosses to hire them, they might be more likely to hire them as well. Not only that but the bosses all over the nation are saying that after putting in training time, they wouldn't want to fire their employees and start all over again just because.

However, there are a lot of french people with a university education. Its free and public here, so a degree is just a right that students have available to them. As a result there are an enormous amount of people going into subjets that interest them, but are not always practical.

Because you can, people choose to go to uni, in hopes to get a well paid, high end type job. There is no need for them to go into manual labour etc. Its not going to cost them anymore to get an indepth acedemic education, however inpractical. So these people who graduate with degrees, end up not being able to find work. There is too many of them, and none of them have any work experience.

This law would force a lot of them to take little jobs, in order to get enough experience to be taken seriously in the work force, for a better contract. This becomes an education system problem.

I think the government needs to encourage more people in trades, where there is soo much work that they can't keep up currently, and try to decrease the number of people going into the same subjects in uni.

The CPE isn't really going to change the world, the way the oppostion has made it out to seem like, however it has become a fight between the government and the people. Whos going to give in first. When the president spoke and said that the law is staying, that was the peoples last hope. There is no higher power that people look to to change after the president. Yet there is another strike for tuesday. The fight goes on.

Its an interesting time to be in France. And to think my mom wanted me to come to Europe because its politically stable. I love you mom, don't worry, I'm safe.

I'm moving to the country this weekend. No protesters will go there. Just a bunch of flowers and cows.