A Little Adrift: "You Like to Run?.... Today, You Will Run" : France

The French love to protest. They strike for everything, it is a part of their culture.. Along with an inexplicable obsession with Coldplay and Michael Jackson.

Here are some photos of the workers of Haagen Dazs striking yesterday.

Unfortunately, France is currently experiencing train strikes. Travel chaos! And last weekend when my friend Leah and I wanted to go to Avignon, we arrived at the train station at about 6 am only to learn our train was one that was on strike. Even the office one goes to for ticket refunds was also on strike, which really made things interesting.

This week, we really wanted to go some where and stayed up searching for running trains until 2 am In the morning. We decided the only way this was going to work would be to go to the station a few hours later at about 5:30 am to see what trains would actually be leaving. There's another important component to this, you must make sure that the returning trains will be running too, and hope that you're right or your day trip will turn into a weekend excursion.

We reached the train station very sleepy but determined to take advantage of our time in France. We looked at the timetable boards and saw that there was a train leaving for a town named Roanne at 8:12 am. I liked the town because there were three trains supposedly returning home from there that night and it made me think of the song Roxanne. So off we went to the ticket office for a long wait in line. The time passed quickly..7:15....7:30...8:00... And finally I am speaking with a woman in French asking for tickets and how likely she thinks it will be that we can come home.
We begin to buy the tickets and the time is 8:05... 8:07...the Credit card wasn't working for a second... We received our tickets at 8:10 AM.
The woman switches to English to say one thing to us in a thick French accent : "You like to run? Well today, you will run!" And run we did, off we went to figure out a French train station and find our terminal in a full two minutes.
An hour later we walked into a town we knew nothing about. It was beautiful, and calm, and the buildings were covered in ivy and beautiful cast iron window "lambrequins."