Tulips viewed from my 5th floor window.

Pink flowers which fell on Paris’ streets.

I am not often impressed by street art but this one could have been in a museum or a gallery: it’s more than just a tag. There’s the collage of newspapers, the strange round figures with white eyes - and the materials surrounding the piece add to it like the best of frames.

Speeding inside a tunnel…

Alongside other scooters around the Arc de Triomphe

Les quais de la Seine - always a beautiful spot along the river!

Pinks and whites of baby flowers, green leaves… and the very blue sky of the South of France.

A beautiful flowering tree.

Such a wonderful feeling to walk bare feet in the warm sand… even when it is too cold for a swim.

To make everyone dream: this little house belongs to people my family knows. Their back yards shows a few salads being grown, and the sea a bit further.

Karine is watching the sun setting near Notre Dame de Paris, from the banks of the Seine on the other side.

My cousin, Karine, author of Dessein, les quais de la Seine.
I like the way her hair is being brushed on her face - it makes her look very mysterious, very parisian.

A mother and a child having a wonderful time together on this lovely spring evening.

My two favourite photos of people on the Republique statue:

People, the statue, the sky.

Fraternité = Brotherhood.

Seing the French group “Louise Attaque” on stage was a great moment for me!

Republique crowded with people.

My Place de la Republique - on a day of protest that, I am happy to say, has not turned sour. This time the protest was against the new laws aiming at making immigration to France more difficult.

It is hard to be in France at the moment and not react on the huge movement that is taking place against the CPE - contract of first employment. To sum things up, it is a new form of contract for employers that allows them to fire their employees as they wish during the 2-year period the contract lasts (now reduced by Chirac to 1 year) - this without having to justify why. The whole country has been holding regular strikes for months to stop this from happening, the biggest of which took place last Tuesday.

As a temp worker of course, I am in a state of employment that is even more precarious than if I had been employed through a CPE contract, which makes me not all that inclined to go out in the street to protest the new law. I think the law is not a great idea, just a way for the government to make it look like they are doing something to reduce unemployment. I think the new law will do nothing good to the country, however I don’t think this is that big of a deal since it already exists, in other forms. Of course this law has just become a symbol - people are not just protesting that law but the current government and all it represents.

Though I am against this new law, I must also say I am firmly against the fact that universities have been closed over the matter for two months - stopping students who want to study to do so - that all politicians and groups are trying to use the movement to their own ends, and that once more, trains, undergrounds, and lots more are immobilized, making the whole country hostage. This is a really bad habbit of this country: Striking is not just stopping work and putting your own employer in a difficult position, it is stopping other people from working and moving and putting the whole country in a difficult position. I think that goes against the idea of a democracy. Your own freedom to strike should not stop your neighboor’s freedom to go to work.

This is another reason why these movements make me angry sometimes: the fact that some people take this opportunity to become violent, break everything, steal and hurt others. Tuesday night I got back home to Republique as late as possible as I had heard that the demonstrations had gone especially violent near my home. Indeed, when I got back, I saw that every single shop window had been broken. Needless to say many people got injured and robbed. All this simply makes the whole movement look bad and undermines their message, which is a real shame.

I hadn’t been on Place de la Nation for quite a while and I had forgotten how grateful the statue was in it, compared to the one on Place de la Republique.