Taxi Bleu

Another transportation strike is taking place today and it is raining. Not the little french rain that lasts for five minutes and then gets sunny, it's been raining all day, fairly steadily.

We have a cocktail party tonight. It's a dress-up activity. We've decided to take a taxi. We may take the metro home, we'll decide later.

There are two main taxi companies in Paris - G7 and Taxi Bleu. Taxis are not always available and on the day of a strike, there is a huge demand. Terry decided to call for the cab yesterday to assure that we'd have one. First he called Taxi Bleu. It was an automated system and he didn't feel completely sure that the taxi would come, since he didn't talk to a person. So, he booked a second cab with G7. Very bad move if two cabs arrive at the same time. You can only get in one of them and the other one is furious, as you can imagine.

I asked Terry to cancel one of the taxis. He tried and tried, but since it's the day of a strike, the lines are busy, even on the automated system. It's getting later and later in the afternoon and we haven't canceled one of the taxis yet. I decided to put my new cordless phone with a speaker phone to work. I dialed the number and got put into the recording/music system to wait for an operator. I walked around the apartment with the phone, did my chores, listened to the recording. The phone was my companion for a very long time.

Eventually an operator got on the phone. I started to explain that we needed to cancel the cab and when I got to the end of the sentence, I completely blanked on the work "cancel" in french, which is "annuler". Luckily the woman clairvoyanced what I needed, just as Terry rushed in the room to save me.

The taxi is canceled. Let's just hope the second one shows up.

May

May is not the easiest month to be in France. There are five (5) holidays in May. The first two this year, May 1 and May 8 were on Saturdays. This is both good and bad. I would guess that for the people that work Monday through Friday, a Saturday holiday is a nightmare. No day off, but the one day a week reserved for errands and shopping, Saturday, everything was closed. Yikes! That's worse than a holiday on Sunday.

While there were more closures on May 1 (everything was closed, even museums), the May 8 holiday had a lot of demonstrations which interrupted traffic.

Tomorrow is another holiday. Being that it is on a Thursday, all of France is in transit today and tomorrow and they will be again on Sunday. Traffic will be a disaster because everyone takes off on Friday to make a four day weekend.

The other two holidays are more than a week away, so there's a little time to re-group between holidays.

May is a big month in the US too, with Memorial Day at the end of the month. Many people take off on the Friday before Memorial Day to make it a four-day weekend. It is also the official start of summer, although Manhattan Beach is normally shrouded in "June Gloom" (fog and clouds) until the 4th of July. Luckily we only have one holiday in the month and we've had the intelligence to put it on a Monday so everyone knows they'll get a day off.

As I scramble to get bread (bakery will be closed until Monday they told me), check my activities to make sure things are open, I'm grateful that May is only 1/12th of the year.