Bus #41

What an adventure! A friend and I set out this afternoon to get downtown to visit a coworker. We looked at the website for the bus and metro and discovered that (with the strike) the metro would be closing at 1pm. So that meant that we needed to take the bus. But not many bus lines were running so after about 10 minutes of pouring over the bus line map and the website we were pretty proud of ourselves that we found one bus line that was still running in the general direction of our friend's apartement.
So, we set out, walked to the nearest #41 bus stop and waited. And waited. And waited. 25 mins later, as now a small group of us are waiting impatiently, a passerby stops to tell us that the buses have all stopped, until 4pm. Great! So Karen and I look at our city map, our watch and decide the only thing to do is to...walk. Downtown. All the way downtown. Over an hour later, after many a map checking stop, and getting lost a few times, we arrived at our destination.
We had a great meeting, maybe too much so, because before we knew it, it was 6 pm. Rush hour was just about over and we HAD to get a bus out of downtown or we would have to walk all the way back home. In the dark. Not a good idea. So we rushed out of the apartement, looking for our #41 bus stop that would (hopefully) take us back home (or close to it).
Well, with the strike, everything has changed with the bus lines. There are no "normal" runs. All the buses running out of the downtown area are now based in one area near the shopping center "Centre Bourse". After running around (literally) reading various bus maps, asking various people, we finally figured things out and stood in line to get on the second last bus going our way. 25 minutes of waiting, our bus driver now pulls out, with a bus load of unhappy people. No one likes the new arrangements, everyone is sick of the strike. But at least we are moving and hey, the bus was free. Yep, we didn't have to pay because the city has hired tourist buses to do these special runs so we got to sit in comfort. For a half hour bus ride. In rush hour traffic. With a driver that, so it seemed, was just as unhappy as the rest of us.
Since the city has hired these extra bus drivers and another bus company to do these runs, the police were called in to do security, in case any of the striking workers wanted to cause trouble (or riot, as it has happened in the past). So as we sat on the bus waiting for it to pull out of the station, we counted 5 police vans, 3 police motorcycles and about 30 officers wandering around. Whew.
By the time I got back to where we started our journey, it was too dark and too late to continue walking home so I had to call a neighbor to come and get me and drive me home. I arrived just in time to watch the 8 pm news. There was an article about the strike in Marseille, how the city has hired buses, and it showed the chaos that we just experienced, except with a lot more people--all wanting to get on the same bus. Which is when the police got involved by helping with crowd control. Madness! I tell you, I'm not likely to go downtown anytime soon again until they sort out this strike. Yet another adventure for a small town girl in a city without public transportation.