A French Castle

We all have pick-up lines — mine was that I grew up nearby a cas­tle. You know, so that North Amer­i­cans could fan­ta­size about my “oh-so-French” back­ground. Nah, just kid­ding. It’s just that Nantes hap­pens to have a cas­tle in the cen­ter and since the city is fairly com­pact, well, down­town is very res­i­den­tial so about 50,000 of us “grew up by a castle”.

A French Protest

Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, French gen­er­ally don’t just demon­strate for the sake of it. How­ever, if protests have a main focus point, they also embrace a few broader issues or con­cerns. Case in point, this demon­stra­tion was ini­ti­ated by civil ser­vants’ unions because the gov­ern­ment is try­ing to push for a pen­sion reform to raise the retire­ment age to 62.

The French and the World Cup

In case you didn’t know it, France is out. Dehors, rien à voir. The coun­try which won the World Cup in 1998 was elim­i­nated very early in this year’s World Cup.
French don’t seem sur­prised nor par­tic­u­larly angry but rather gen­er­ally accept­ing. It doesn’t mean they aren’t com­plain­ing though. The loss of the French team, “les bleus” is seen as another symp­tom of how bad France is doing these days, both polit­i­cally and economically.

Palais de Justice

“Jus­tice palace”, this is how French call cour­t­houses. The junior high/ high school I attended for 6 years from age 12 to 18 was located in the cen­ter of Nantes, stuck between the main cour­t­house, the police sta­tion and the jail where sus­pects were held by the police before their trial. The Banque de France was in a nearby street and the back of the build­ing was fac­ing our schoolyard.

On The Way To France

It may only be 6:23 (!) to go from Mon­tréal to Paris, but the total trip was closer to 24 hours.

We left Ottawa Sat­ur­day after­noon and took the Grey­hound to Mon­tréal. The bus was almost empty and we were at the air­port around 7 pm. A quick lunch/dinner later, we started queu­ing for check-in, which took over 1:30. Another line-up for secu­rity and we boarded the plane just before midnight.

Going To...

We are on our way to France and will stay in Europe until July 31 st. I haven’t spent a sum­mer in France since 2003 — at the time, I was com­ing back from Aus­tralia and New-Zealand and I spent the sum­mer study­ing for my uni­ver­sity exams. It was the hottest sum­mer ever in Europe and I spent half of my time camp­ing at the beach with a bunch of friends. Seven years later, I don’t have that many friends left in France but Feng and I should have fun nonethe­less — I remem­ber sum­mer in France as a nice season.