Michel

Tuesday evening we went down to the Bibliothèque Francois Mitterrand and walked along the Seine for a while. We looked in on all the dreamy looking skiffs and inviting on-the-water venues; we saw some creative graffiti, and then we ran into hundreds of gendarmes at the Gare d'Austerlitz. Today was the biggest and most important manifestation for the left fighting against the current retirement reforms. Apparently, some demonstrators got out of hand.
As we stop by and watched the gendarmes assemble themselves, an older man approached us and began talking about the gendarmes and the "belle manif" that was taking place. We talked for a long, long time. He ended up being a professor at Nanterre and was really interested in talking to us about the changes he's seen in Paris, the current government, communism and socialism, cultural disparity, religion, etc. Just a run-of-the-mil type of conversation. He was super interested in us being LDS, and he actually owned a Book of Mormon. In the end, he made us go to McDonald's with him to chat for a while longer. Some of his biggest regrets about the changes he's seen in Paris is that there is not enough radicals and weirdos around anymore! The most interesting part of our conversation (to me) is when he pointed out how differently our two cultures value people. For the most part, people in the States assert their self-worth according to careers and wealth/property accumulation: in France, that really doesn't matter. He told us that the French admire those that don't seem to have a lot going for them. Those that Americans would typically assume is a "loser" with no future, the French would assume is a poet. Michel reminded me why I love France.