The Easter Holidays are over, and we had to head on the way back to our dear amphitheaters and classrooms.


Monday

The first day of the second part of the semester was somewhat chaotic, I must say. Not as much as the second one.
After a 3-hour Espistemology lecture on Monday, the General Assembly took place in Amphitheater Descartes, the one that had been the occupation HQ back in March. The General Assembly had to make a summary of the various actions that took place during the holidays, and decide on what to do next.

The strike was voted at a large majority.
Blockade and occupation were voted with a 5-10 votes difference.

I personally reckon that voting a blockade at that point was very stupid. I usually support it for various reasons that I already posted on here (it allows students to not have to miss their classes, and by getting the classes suspended nobody gets thrown out the exam lists... and other reasons as well). Zones A and B, i.e. 80% of the country (62 universities out of 84), are still on holidays. They were waiting to see what we would be doing, We have no support, as everybody believes that we've got what we wanted thanks to the tv reports. And we were still weak from the holidays. I'd've waited until just before Zone A's holidays would end, i.e. May 9th.

Anyway, as a result the Sorbonne was occupied on the evening by a few hundreds students. The police threw them out around 21 o'clock.


Tuesday


Blockade was prevented on Tuesday morning because they weren't enough against the Guardians. As I said, half the people thought that blocking wasn't a good idea anyway, hence the few support they had.

During the afternoon, Prime Minister de Villepin was due to come to launch his latest brilliant idea : a national debate about university and employment committee.
That committee doesn't take students into account, however, and the Coordination is not invited to debate.
The Sorbonne Committee feels that if the government really wanted to do something for us, they would have had us fill documents and polls and all sort of stuff to get our opinion on the first place !

Needless to say that the Sorbonne students were totally unhappy with this. So they gathered on Place de la Sorbonne.
( You may need the map to follow the events )

Villepin was due to enter the Sorbonne by the private quarters, that's on Rue Saint-Jacques. It's on the far North of the building, on the right on the map. We were gathered on Place de la Sorbonne, on the left side.

Suddenly, around 1 hour before the PM was due to arrive, two lines of riot cops blocked the street that goes in front of the Sorbonne : Rue de la Sorbonne to the North and Rue Victor Cousin to the South. They then started to push us backwards and so we escaped by Rue Champollion. That's the very tiny street going North, parallel to Rue de la Sorbonne and Boulevard Saint-Michel (it's between these two).

As a result, we ended up on Rue des Ecoles, just close to where Villepin was supposed to arrive.

Then again, there was a cops line accross the street we were on and they started to push us backwards towards Boulevard Saint-Michel. We guessed that they wanted to keep us out of focus for the tv cameras. His coming back into the peaceful, nice Sorbonne sort of scenario was being threatened, I guess.

Trouble is... we weren't being exactly violent. No car was hurt and no shop was either. We were merely standing there singing slogans. The cops were unnecessarily hot-blooded.

One of them in particular was some half a metre in front of his line trying to poke everyone with his shield. At one point, he pushed a (rather) tiny girl who didn't want it unnoticed, so she started shouting at him. He moved to hit her in the face with his stick, but I managed to get between these two, turning myself so the strike hit my backbag. To give you an idea, I had one of those plastic water bottles in there, it was completely smashed (luckily, it was empty).

The riot cop wasn't pleased and I didn't give him a chance to do whatever else and I fled towards the boulevard.

Then we were pushed on the boulevard, which they blocked themselves. Inhabitants of the neighbourhood were driven mad. Cops were blocking all the streets out. At the moment, I was on the boulevard, just North of the crossroads, outside of the crossroads where they had most of us encircled. They were just making the place more tight, and at one point, a first air car arrived then went away with someone inside.

We who were still out of the circle suddenly got pushed in there. I ended up going by the cop that was unhappy at me, just as I was finishing a phone call. Bad idea. The cop took his chance and aimed at my hand.

My poor cellphone probably prevented it from breaking, but it broke itself and fell, and ended up behind the cops line, who wouldn't let me take it back and they just pushed us further. When I managed to get out of there, it was gone.


So that's about it. A crap day.



Wednesday

That was a bit awkward. First of all, I woke up at around 14, while I had gone to bed quite early. So much for my Contemporary History class (hopefully not an important one).
So I headed to the Police Office to get my passport done. I at last managed to buy a fiscal stamp (I first couldn't find any around here, then when I found them near my university they would only take cheques !)...
Lucky, I said. It was "exceptionally closed".

Bastards.


So now, I am left here with :

• 0 money,
• my laptop that won't get loaded, HP wants 265 euros to fix it,
• I need to buy a new phone, and in the meantime my line goes on. New phones are a hell expensive, I basically can't get a decent one for less than 179 euros at the very moment (when I think that for new lines you can have these for about 49 euros !),
• I need a bit of money to buy the present I planned for my sister, which would make me spend around 110 euros in total,
• Last but not least, I have to finance my travelling to the European Social Forum (see below)...

Nice, eh ?

Oh, and the Universities Chancellor made up a black list, so that now some students are forbidden to enter the Sorbonne. That's totally illegal, because 1) these students haven't been suspended by their universities, 2) all and every students with a student card has the right to enter the Sorbonne, 3) they won't give out the list, in spite of the law on personnal data (78-17 and 2004-801), and 4) it's not for them to decide on that anyway. All they can do is to sue these students, but I'd like to see what reason they'll use...

Also, I'm on the way to go to the European Social Forum in Athens, as a Sorbonne student representative with about 5 or 6 others ! We'd be leaving on the 1st of May and returning on the 9th. Travelling to Athens takes time...
The price is 150 euros, for transport, entrance and accomodation. Bargain, yeah, but you still need to find them ! A bit of it will be financed by the Strike Cash Point, but it's not very full.
The travel is bus and boat : Paris > Annecy > Mont Blanc > Courmayeur > Milano > Verona > Venice > Patra > Athens. A 2099 km trip... woah ! (when I think it takes 3 hours to fly there...)

I'd really love that, because I'm really keen on taking part in the ESF, esp. since the one that took place in Paris in 2003 ! Plus, I have never been in Italy really and I haven't been in Greece for nearly eleven years, so that'd be an occasion to visit my godfather and godmother as well !

Just need the money :(

Program for tomorrow : Getting at last my passport done !

That's about it for today, off to bed ! I hope you're all doing well !