A week of bloquée and soirée.

I'm sure that title looks like gibberish to most of you, but I'll explain it. Thursday was quite an interesting day because there was a student "manifestation" at my school. They've been happening all over France in lycées (high schools) and universities in response to what is being called the "loi Pecresse," or the Pecresse law. The law will do a few things, including:

• privatizing universities, which will increase price for French students. Universities are either free or nearly free here, which means you just need to pay for somewhere to live, food to eat, and books.
• increasing class size to a minimum of 35 students in lycées, and
• taking away "demi-classe" hours, which are hours during the week that the class is split into two. This allows the teachers to get to know the students a little better, which is of course better for education if the students take advantage of it.

As a result of this law, these manifestations or strikes have been happening a bit. They've taken the form mostly of "bloquées," where the students block the entries to academic campuses or buildings. That's what happened at my school on Thursday morning, which meant I missed a couple hours of class. The manifestations will probably resume Tuesday, although that is not certain as I do not know the result of the vote that was taken Friday on whether or not to carry on with it. Also, most of the students that are leading the manifestation, not just the ones who were participating to get out of class, are members of the Young Communist Party.

As for the soirée (party) part of the title, I celebrated Thanksgiving here yesterday. So last week I wrote that I was cooking for 10 people, which was true then. However, the night after I wrote my blog my host mother told me that it had exploded up to 20 people. When I heard that the first time we just started laughing because if I had been nervous before, I didn't know what I was going to be when the amount of people doubled.

But it actually turned out pretty well. I woke up pretty early and got started on two apple pies and two pumpkin pies, all before lunch (thanks for the recipes Grampy). That was especially interesting because I used a real pumpkin to make the pumpkin pies, as they do not have canned pumpkin here. After lunch I made the sweet potatoes, roasted the seeds from the pumpkin, and got to relax a little bit. My host mother and I collaborated on the turkey, while she made the stuffing and the green beans and I made the gravy. It was a little different than the Thanksgiving that I'm used to, as we didn't start dinner until after 10 and finished dessert at about one o'clock. Everyone had an excellent time and gave good feedback on the food, which might have been helped by the amount of Beaujolais wine and Armagnac that was consumed. So I survived and had a pretty good time too. I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving as well!