Paranoid Parisian Police

September 11th must have spooked the French (amongst others). All throughout Paris there is a strong police presence. Freshly scrubbed youths wearing a uniform and carrying fire-arms. France, being a country with a big goverment sector, with somewhere close to 1 in 4 people being employed by the government, employs a lot of police.

However, what is a tad more disconcerting is the presence of soldiers roaming the tunnels of the metro. It's not so much that they are soldiers and not police. Not that soldiers are meant to kill and not to maintain public order. It's just that it's the closest I've come to the presence of a fully automatic machine gun. They're ugly things yet I find them strangely fascinating. Bits of metal flying at high speed and high freauency.

But perhaps the greatest sign of paranoia is that EVERY garbage bin in the Paris metro has been boarded up. This was very confusing for me at first. I would walk up to something that looked like a garbage bin. That smelt like a garbage bin and was placed roughly where one would expect to find a garbage bin. But there would be no actual receptable. A slim line black piece of plastic would cover the opening. I found out later that all garbage bins had been enclosed to stop terrorists from planting bombs in the metro.

However; if the French really want to keep the tourists coming, they'd be better off taking care of their disgruntled workers. Why, a friend told me that there had a month long strike by all the museums of Paris for better pay conditions just a few months ago. That would have sucked big time.