In the immortal words of Socrates, "...I drank what?"

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!!!

SO. Frustrating. Strikes drive me absolutely nuts. I have been in France for five and a half months, and have now experienced no less than three train strikes (and witnessed a hairdressers' mini-strike/protest thing in Tours). I was gonna go to Nancy again today, and so was looking for trains on the sncf website. It kept giving me a message saying that certain trains I was viewing might be delayed due to perturbations. Gah. Ok. I won't go into detail, to spare you and myself, but basically what happened is that certain train times appeared at the beginning of my search, and then disappeared and were replaced with other times during the second part of my search, and then, when I tried to click on those, it kept giving me the 'perturbations' message and telling me to pick another train, except ALL the options they were giving me just recycled the page when clicked with the perturbation messages all over the place. I checked the traffic info for the region and saw that something happened yesterday with a commercial wagon skipping the tracks (I think?) on one train line and that traffic around there would be running around 30 minutes late.

However, this didn't seem to explain the problem I was experiencing, because the area affected is quite a few kilometers southeast of where I want to travel, and not the same line at all, as far as I can tell. I thought, hm, perhaps there's a strike? Again? Sure. It's France, why not. So, I looked up sncf strike on google (grève sncf) and found that they started a strike on Wednesday the 12th (meaning it actually started on the 11th, Tuesday night vers 20h). So, great. Another strike. I think they are complaining of the same problem, the revocation of their early retirement privileges (that were put in place ages ago when constantly being on trains/conducting trains was hazardous to one's health and therefore railworkers died at an earlier age). I could be wrong, though, I don't know. Argh! So frustrating.

Anyway, one news site said I should check the TER site from SNCF. So I did, and all of a sudden all of my train options were back. I went back to the news site and they said that for the most accurate traffic info I should go to SNCF's infolignes site, where I had first been that explained the track-jumping car that shouldn't affect me at all. Further reasearch suggested that none of SNCF's traffic information could be trusted. So. I am almost back where I was when I started my search over an hour ago, except more thoroughly confused and having missed the train I was intending to take at the beginning (assuming it was running at all). So. Yeah. Awesome.

I think I may go to the station anyway, just to see if there's any info there. Except I won't use my bus pass to get there, cause if I lose a bus ride over this shit without being able to take a train, I will be mad.

Goodness gracious.