La Grève, and other happenings

Well three days into my first full-force week in Paris, and I'm not gonna lie, it's too much. But such is life and I will adjust. Teaching on Monday went really well. Obviously, the easiness of teaching is in direct proportion to how well I prepare. The tricky part is my A. lack of printer/photocopier and B. laziness. I can make lesson plans at home, but then it is a pain in the ass to go to the print shop and pay for photocopies and printing. Or I can lesson plan during my lunch break at school, but then I'm only half-way through the day and I can't prepare a lesson plan for the classes I haven't yet had. So. There you go. Anyway, tomorrow is the last day of instruction I'm doing for a while, cuz Monday is review day and on Thursday I'm doing Halloween day. I suppose I should ask the teachers if they mind if I give their students candy, right? Hopefully they don't say no, because honestly there is just no point without candy. Other than that, there will be vocab and maybe mask-making.
Tuesday I had my first class at Nanterre, a written expression class with a hard-ass French professor. Fun is not the word I would use, but hopefully I'll learn something useful. I also forced myself to work out in the morning so I could get it out of the way. In the evening was a big, three-course group dinner with the MICEFA peeps. It was all very French. And I ate veal, guys. It was sad. It tasted like pot roast. But honestly, it was pretty bland overall. So I have discovered a French dish that I'm kinda like "ehhhh" about. Oh and we were too busy being loud Americans in the metro to board the train in a timely manner, so I got my purse stuck in the doors. It was pretty much hilarious. Nothing fell out or anything, we just waited until the next stop and it was free.
Today was a fun-filled trip to the Hotel Dieu (a medieval hospital which, I was shocked to learn, is still functioning. In fact we saw some poor guy being wheeled into surgery on a gurney). I was basically trippin' today because I had class this morning, a short break to get some work done, then three more hours of class, then the gym and sleep. Plus somewhere in there I needed to go to Office Depot to buy notebooks and find somewhere to get cat food. I really don't think there's anything here akin to Petco, and the only real pet stores I know of are a metro ride away, which is not so convenient. There is an organic supermarket nearby that I checked, but no such luck. So I bought Puckleberry some super expensive food at a vet's office, because so far that's the only place I have found that sells quality cat food.
So there is a huge transportation strike tomorrow, and the inspector of the academy where I work sent me an email today saying that I should ditch tomorrow and I can make up the day another time. Yeah fuckin' right. My only free day is Friday and like hell I'm doing two days back-to-back. So when I go to work, I take two metros and the train. Well the train I take is not striking, and one of the metro lines doesn't have drivers and so doesn't strike. So that leaves the problem of getting to Chatelet, so I'm just going to take a cab. I sent all of this to my boss and she didn't get back to me, so whatever. I'll try to go and if I make it, then bien. If not, I'll suck it up. But I'm pretty sure it's all good. Oh and my Thursday night class was canceled because of the strike, so tomorrow might not be so tough.