The city of loath

Day 28

So, despite the late night and a greater than daily recommended intake of energy drinks, I woke up feeling quite perky about 15 minutes before my alarm went off.

I was on the top floor of the hostel, and had my feet facing east with a window across the room from me. I had the good fortune to get to watch the sun rise on my final day in the UK. It was a very good start to the day.

I got up and showered when my alarm went off. Now, for those of you that haven’t had the joy of spending time in a hostel, one of the things that you find is that there isn’t a lot of privacy to be had, and very few areas where two people can sneak off to and have relations. When I entered the bathroom, I found (I assume) a girl’s g-string hanging off the tap.

Well played, shaggers. Well played.

The previous day I had shed a whole heap of weight from my bag, various bibs and bobs that I would no longer require. So, a whole heap of dirty socks and jocks as well as my speakers were bid farewell as I made my way downstairs and over to the train station.

I asked the man in the booth what train I needed to catch to get out to the airport.

“The one that says ‘airport’” he helpfully answered.

Right.

I bought my ticket and headed to the appropriate platform.

It was quite a pleasant train trip to the airport, watching more of the Manchurian sunrise.

When I got to the airport, though, the fates started sucking the jam out of my doughnut. No, that is not a euphemism.

I got to the airport and found that I had to walk to Terminal 3. This was a 20 minute walk literally from one side of the airport to the other.

What are you complaining about? I hear you say. You have a trundle bag with wheels!

Well, one of the great things about airports is that you quite often have to go up and down levels in the airport (and then back up again quite often), and the airport designers love putting poles at the top and bottom of escalators that make it very difficult to get through unless you are toting hand luggage sized bag.

I understand that they don’t want some idiot to push a baggage-laden trolley down the escalators, but c’mon! Surely a few more inches isn’t too much to ask for. (Yeah yeah, I hear you commenting “That’s what she said.”)

So, I finally got to Terminal 3 and the counter that I was supposed to book into. There was a very long queue, which I jumped to the end of, waiting patiently for my turn. The queue moved very slowly.

I noticed a large number of people milling around a few computer terminals conveniently located right in the middle of the queue (these were people pushing through the queue to access the computers). A lady wearing the uniform of Air France walked along the line, asking people if they had their boarding passes already.

Huh? I thought. Don’t we get our boarding passes when we check in?

No – apparently not. You are supposed to get your boarding pass from those computers before jumping in the line.

Great. So I had been waiting in the line for 20 minutes and didn’t realize this.

When the lady got to me and asked me about the boarding pass, I informed her of how brilliant a system they had here, and that I couldn’t think of a single thing to streamline their process. Well, in my head at least.

She was willing to mind my bag while I went and got my boarding pass, which was quite nice of her.

I returned to my spot in the queue, waited another 20 minutes, and discovered that Air France, being the budget airline that they are, were booking 5 flights in at the same time through 4 counters. And the conveyor belt that normally takes you bags away was broken. Sigh.

So I waited in a queue for 40 minutes to have someone put a sticker on my bag, and then be told to take it “over there” to have it put on the plane.

After that frustrating turn of events, I thought it couldn’t get any worse, had a couple of cigarettes and boarded the plane.

The plane trip was blissfully uneventful, and we arrived in Paris about 20 minutes before our scheduled time. Great. J

Or so I thought.

Right, I’m going to put this out there. I HATE CHARLES DE GAUL AIRPORT!

I swear it was designed by a sadist with the sole intention of annoying as many visitors as possible and making them as surly as the locals.

12pm. After getting off the plane, there were no clear directions on where to go to collect our bags. People started milling around in confusion, and slowly (using herd osmosis) managed to find our way up an escalator, along a corridor, down an escalator, along another corridor (back the way from which we had originally come), and to a bottleneck where too few staff were checking to make sure that people had their passports.

Then we went up 2 escalators, walked a bit more, and caught an internal train to another terminal. I must say though that everybody was looking at each other as we waited at the train platform, none of us having any idea on whether we were supposed to catch the train or not.

1pm. At the new terminal we were again forced to walk, going up and down escalators for about 20 minutes, before we got to the customs area.

1.20pm. People started queuing up in an area divided by those changeable fabric barriers strung between poles. There were half a dozen staff members standing around talking amongst themselves, until they saw that there were a whole heap of people lining up.

I think they then decided to brighten up their afternoon by playing with the barriers, letting about 12 people through to different areas before blocking it off again, then doing the same thing in another spot.

I reckon it took about 30 minutes of these shenanigans before I had a surly individual take a cursory glance at my passport before using their rubber stamp and telling me to enjoy Paris.

2pm. We finally made it to the luggage collection point. I thought that 2 hours after landing our luggage should be waiting for us on the conveyor belts. But no. We had to wait for another 45 minutes for the luggage from our flight to come out.

While we were waiting, there were 5 flights that arrived after us that collected their luggage before us.

Since I had plenty of time on my hands, I decided to exchange some of my pounds for euros.

The exchange rate was about 1 pound to 1.2 euros, but I found that after changing my money that I had started with 100 pounds and ended up with 90 Euros.

Not sure how that was supposed to work, but I could see that the girl behind the counter really didn’t give a rat’s arse so I wasn’t going to come out ahead if I decided to argue with her.

2.45pm. I finally collected my bag and headed out for a much needed cigarette. After de-stressing, I sought directions on where to find the train station at the airport.

“Just follow everybody else that way” was the helpful response I received at the information booth.

So, I followed everybody else for about another 20 minutes to the train station. There was nobody there to give you directions or help you find your way, but fortunately I had read up a bit on the train system and knew that you could buy a ’10 trip’ bunch of tickets and just jump on a train as long as you knew where you were going.

3.15pm. The train arrived at the airport, which I boarded, grabbed a seat, and prepared myself for the ride into Paris.

Oh, I forgot to mention that this particular day in Paris was 35 degrees. So not only was I out of sorts because of the 3 hours it took me to leave the airport, I was also dangerously close to breaking a sweat. And necks.

The hostel that I was staying at was kind enough to give directions in their e-mail on how to get there via the train system, with a secondary route also. Which was just as well, since when I arrived at the train station where I needed to change lines, it turned out that they were doing works on the platform that one of the connecting trains left from. I had to take the alternate route which involved changing trains twice more.

I got off at my station and sure enough started walking the wrong way. After 10 minutes I realized this and turned around.

The neighborhood I was walking through looked pretty crummy. Half of the stores had their roller shutters down, and there were several groups of people sitting around in their own urine, drinking on the side of the road. A great welcoming committee.

4.20pm. I finally arrived at the hostel. Fortunately it was nice. I checked in, dumped my bags, and headed down to the seating area and grabbed a large bottle of Bulmers to keep me company.

I was thoroughly fed up with Paris already, and I had barely scratched the surface.

About 5pm, the girl behind the counter at the hostel told me (in no uncertain terms) to go out and see a bit of the surrounding area as it was such a beautiful day out there.

Grudgingly I accepted the challenge.

And I am glad that I did. I went for a walk through a nearby park which was very pretty, lots of people sitting around enjoying the sun. I also took a walk through the surrounding blocks and made my way back to the hostel.

Upon returning, I met a couple of the people that I was sharing the room with. In a room of 6, there were three other Aussies, a Canadian and an American. In fact, I met more Aussies at this hostel than I had anywhere else on my trip.

Two of the Aussies and the Canadian, Derek (sorry, I can’t remember the names of the Aussies) decided to go out to grab a bite to eat for dinner. We were all hanging for some Asian food, so we located a restaurant further down the street.

On the way to the restaurant I stopped at an ATM to get out some money. Given that I was in France, the main language was French on the ATM. I pressed the button to make it speak English. Nothing happened.

I pressed the English button a second time, still nothing.

A third time, and still nothing. Even the ATMs refuse to speak English here!

Fortunately, the fourth time worked.

I’m sure if I had pressed “German” it would have worked the first time. Out of fear.

So, Derek, the two others and myself all headed into the restaurant, and found that the staff only spoke two languages: French and Thai. No English.

We all had a laugh and decided to play lucky dip with the menu. Some of the items had pictures, which the other two Aussies used to choose their meals, while Derek and I chose to roll the dice. Derek ordered something that was “Imperial Beef”, and I ordered something that I knew was a Szechuan dish, but didn’t know what type of meat was in the dish.

Derek’s beef dish looked pretty shmick, while my dish turned out to be Szechuan prawns. Very yummy.

After dinner the 4 of us trundled back up to the hostel and grabbed a couple of drinks to have in the hostel’s courtyard. After 2 drinks the two other Aussies headed off, and Derek and I continued to drink until the wee early hours of the morning.

This was Derek’s last night before heading back home, and his first international trip. I was glad that he had been bitten by the travel bug, and we spoke of maybe doing a big Southern America trip in the future.

Just as we were finishing up our drinks for the night, I received a text message from a friend’s wife. If you followed my previous trip, you might remember that I traveled with a couple of friends, Doolittle and Lapzang. Lapzang is my oldest friend from school.

I saw that Doolittle had sent me a message, and in my drunken state I was happy to check it out. Unfortunately, the message informed me that Lapzang had a brain tumor and was about to go into hospital to have it removed. (Note, Lapzang is now doing well, they have removed the tumor and will find out over the next couple of months exactly how it is all panning out.)

I headed off to bed, glad that I had gone out for dinner with my room-mates which saved my first day of Paris.