My sister Susanna had never been to France before this visit, although for some reason I thought she had (I knew she'd taken French in high school, and I apparently somehow transmuted that in memory into her actually visiting France). But she took completely in stride (after a transatlantic flight, no less) my rather cavalier directions about taking the Metro to get to her train and finding a hotel to book us a room and so forth, so there may be some excuse for my thinking that she'd done it before. Partly due to that misapprehension, I didn't bother much about arranging any canonical sightseeing or other standard foreign-visitor activities, so she ended up with a somewhat idiosyncratic tourist experience that C and I refer to as the "protest-marches-and-yarn-stores tour of France".
Susanna got to see something of Bordeaux, Strasbourg and Paris, plus a fair bit of French countryside from the trains connecting them, and more than enough interiors of train stations during our long waits to find out how la grève would affect our tickets and travel schedules. There were several of the strikers' "days of action" during her visit, so I think she encountered at least one protest demonstration and/or its aftereffects in every city. Bordeaux was having a day-long protest of at least, I would say, scores of thousands of people, so we wandered through town until we found the march and followed along with them for a bit, dropping out now and then to do a little shopping or tour a cathedral or something. There were riot cops everywhere, but (or perhaps hence) the protest didn't seem to drift towards anything that I'd call "unrest". It was a bit odd, in fact, to find a massive social protest right in the middle of a busy urban downtown going about its business, and casually incorporating the social protest into its business, with protesters taking a break from the march now and then to drop in to a cafe for lunch or a drink. I don't know whether any local businesses were offering "specialités de la grève" to mark the occasion, but I wouldn't be surprised. The Strasbourg demonstrations that C saw were apparently a bit more confrontational, with youths overturning dumpsters and so on, but personally I never saw anything that looked like real instability.
So although I feel a bit frivolous admitting it, I have to say that the protests didn't radicalize our perspective to the extent of deflecting us from our shopping. Highlights of said shopping included a nice store in Strasbourg where C and I sampled some French yarn, and a visit---well, more like a pilgrimage, really---well, to be honest, a couple of pilgrimages---to
this place in Paris, which is world-famous for its elite merchandise and design (and prices to match). One of its idiosyncrasies is selling yarns by weight rather than in prepackaged skeins or balls; I picked up some really nice silk and baby alpaca blends and matching beads that have been partially metamorphosed into a scarf, and I'm now trying to figure out what to do with the rest.
