en grève !

It just hit me the other day that it's hardly very French of me to keep blogging along every day without going on strike every now and then.

So for this entire extended weekend I will be on strike and not producing any further blog entries or even commenting on other blogs or forums!!!

(By fortuitous coincidence, this strike lines up with a family trip to Paris.)

Don't get me wrong -- I don't want this little strike to seem condescending, as if I'm ridiculing French striking customs (unlike my husband who -- when I asked him about his students all being on strike -- replied "Really, they are not working very much anyway").

Personally I think it's cool that ordinary French people are inclined to stand up for themselves in this manner, unlike U.S. workers who sometimes seem to take a Ferengi-like attitude of favoring exploitation of workers because they imagine they will one day climb from the working class to the exploiting class.

And as far as the French custom of having political demonstrations all the time is concerned, I think it's cool that people have the idea that democracy is about participation. You know, instead of thinking it's about saying "yeah!" in the privacy of your own car while listening to some talk-radio guy complain about the govenrment.

Now there have been a lot of strikes here in France recently -- particularly young people protesting a change in the employment contract laws if I understand correctly. You might be curious as to the details of the issues at hand and what the outcome of the strikes has been, etc. That's the kind of helpful research and information I'd be blogging right here if I weren't on strike.

I hope this blog strike will not inconvenience any of my weekend readers. For those who are visiting over the weekend, I would like to invite you to read my latest mishie adventure below, or if you have already read that, pleasee check out some of my earlier antics in the archives!!! :D

I'll be seeing you back in cyberspace in a few days!!!