Month: April 2010

When you come to a new country at some point you will have to discover that the law is different and that what is wrong or right in your society not necessarily similar elsewhere. The topic of drugs and prostitutions, unpleasant thought it is, has been talked about a lot these days in my entourage. Maryjane is naturally a complicated subject because it is not as clear-cut as one might think. Though it is illegal, in the US and in France, it is also everywhere.

I cannot explain how shocked I was when I went to Amsterdam and saw the word ‘joint’ in the coffee shop menu. It was shocking, but the more I think back to that moment, it is also looked very logical. Indeed the Dutch model is quite realistic: if you cannot beat it, control it. So yes, when you go to Amsterdam you will smell and see maryjane everywhere, along with the thousands of spring-breakers that fly across the ocean for some 9 hours just to do it freely for two days. The Belgians are really close to adopt the model and I think the Germans will follow.

The funny one is prostitution. The French are shocked at a famous case going on in Paris: a Muslim minor who ‘frequented’ football players from Real Madrid and earned a good 20,000 Euros a month. Something along the lines of Moulin Rouge, I suppose. The joke is not on the fact that the world has to face that football players are men, but in figuring out whether they knew she was a minor or not at the time that they ‘saw’ each other. I realized that some French think prostitution is legal in France, because it is quite a custom here, and others say it is not. Regardless of what the verdict is, it is done everywhere in France for an average of 30 Euros per performance.

So remember to not be judgmental when you come live in a foreign country, amuse yourself, be prepared to see it all and hear it all, even in a safe and small city like Strasbourg.

That sums up the dominant event of the past week. Europe has really lost all sense of organization and control this time. These past two weeks have been rather good for me, we had a long break and I was able to get some work done, rest and visit some unique places in Europe.

These past few days, however, kind of ruined the possibility of nicely ending the vacation because a volcano in Iceland decided the world was not already dealing with enough challenges and he felt like he had to erupt, thereby causing an ash cloud that European air technology is simply unable to handle. Consequently, there are no planes moving in the greater part of continental Europe, the UK and Ireland.

Thankfully, my boyfriend and I came back from Amsterdam last week; but sadly for him, and for my work, his flight back to Manchester has now been cancelled twice and there is simple no certainty as to when he, or the hundreds of thousands stranded, will fly. All you hear about on the radio and see on TV is the voices and images of the ‘victims’ of this situation in all the airports across Europe.

The airlines are obviously digging their graves, because the losses are now estimated in the hundreds of millions per day. The governments are trying to act powerful and attempting to find ‘corridors’, as the French minister said, to bring back the French stuck outside of their motherland.

I believe the French are freaking out the most because there is a group in particular whose vacations had just begun or ended when the eruption occurred, the Parisians. If you know the Parisians, you’d imagine how happy they are to be stuck in some airport or to be trapped here and have missed their flight. Parisians barely have time to say Bonjour in the street, much less to be trapped in a non-smoking airport with no way out.

Europe is thus freaking out. No one knows when flights will resume, including the other HC student in Strasbourg Katherine who is stuck in Madrid, and no one knows if the volcano eruptions will continue. Hopefully my next blog post will be of happy news that things have resumed their course! A la prochaine!