Earth, Wind and Fire or French Revolution

Let me get the boring stuff out of the way first. I went to the Louvre yesterday to see the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo. Afterwords I traveled out to Versailles to see the Palace and the Garden. All were very nice and took some great pictures.

I thought that would have been my whole day, but it gets better. When I was walking back from visiting Versailles, I noticed everyone in the bars huddled around the TVs watching the news. I thought to myself, "Wow, the French really make an event out of watching the news." I got to my hostel their TV was turned to the news too which displayed a count down like on New Year's Eve.

At about 14 seconds I turned and asked the guy at the front desk what was going on. He quickly hushed me and informed me that they were about to announce the new president of France. Then the a guy's picture emerged, Nicolas Sarkozy won and half of Paris erupted into cheers. But not everyone in Paris was happy. I asked the guy at the front desk was this a good or bad thing. He responded and I quote, "No. He is like Bush. This is a bad day for France."

There was young lady from Texas, Katherine, who was in the lobby watching the events too. She has been living in France for the past year and is fluent in french. I asked her if she could explain the difference between the guy and the woman, Royal, of the socialist party. She compared Royal to Hillary Clinton and Sarkozy to a short version of Bush. Currently France has reached a fork in the road with whether to be a society that integrates with other cultures or preserve their French heritage. (I'll let you guess who is on which side). There has been an influx of immigrants from previous French colonies in Northern Africa. Plus, their unemployment rate has reached 8%.

Enough with political facts I just needed to set the scene. While Katherine and I were watching the news we saw that there was a victory party going on in the center of Paris. So we decided to find the victory party (We don't party with losers). They had a full out concert in the center of Paris with over 10,000 people. As walked up to the concert, I began to hear Earth, Wind and Fire performing. Sorry, it was not them but a French imitation group singing all American songs in English and just as good as the American performers. The concert was excellent and FREE.

So after we left the victory concert we went back to the hostel. Near the hostel there was a mob of people marching in protest. When I went into the lobby of hostel there was a guy from Ireland named James in and he was just as curious as me to see were the crowed was going. At that point we decided to go join the French Revolution. However, by the time we walked outside everyone was gone. So we started to walk around the streets behind the hostel and eventually came upon a peaceful group of protestors walking around with this tacky piece of blown up plastic. We walked with them until there bad idea of a float deflated and they had no more duck to save it from its many holes.

As we left the peaceful group and walked back to the hostel we notice an angry mob across the street from us and only one block from our hostel. As we walked by them on the opposite side of the street, they began to hurl bottles at riot police who were lined up in their full riot gear. Before we knew it tear gas cans were being shot into the crowd. One of the cans got kicked over near James and I spraying tear gas in our direction. At that point we thought it was a good idea to run.

When I got back to the hostel I went to my room with the three old women. They had saw the whole thing from our room. As we looked out of our window we could see the police attacking the Revolution outside the front door of our hostel. We had to close our windows because the tear gas started to come into our room. The riot police was able to quickly move the crowd away from our building.

One thing I can say is that I learned so much about French politics. Tomorrow I'll be on my way to Barcelona.