Manif

Today was exciting.

I went out for a nice calming walk around the Paris suburb I lived in when I went to high school here. It's a beautiful place, with rough stone houses, and little wooded paths. Also, it is home to the best pain au raisin in all of Paris.

You know, it's funny. The banlieu, which are the French suburbs, have all those famous riots, right? Well, like I said, my walk was about the best thing, ever. And then, we go back to Paris.

We're at the metro station, transferring from the banlieu line to the local one. The platform we get off at, we hear some yelling, see some cops . . . well, it happens. We go on with our transfer.

We're going under one of the rail lines. Down some stairs . . . down the corridor . . . BANG!!! . . . run up some stairs, to our next platform, as far away from the source of noise as we can. The train is there, it's doors are closed. Nothing is crumbling, everything in the station seems to be intact. People further down are coughing and covering their face with scarves when they can.

At first, because there seemed to be no damage, I'd assumed that the police must have neutralized some suspicious package or something. But the bang was much too loud for that. And then I realized that it was tear gas.

So, like I said, exciting.

I learned later that some anarchists (or, erm, "far left activists") were protesting outside the station. They were upset that the police dared to jail one of their guys, an innocent anarchist whose only crime was to plant bombs on some high speed rail lines. Who needs high speed rail, anyway? (Actually, the real question is where the hell do over 1000 protesting crazy people come from? That's how many were protesting. Scarry.)