Newark
-Flying stand-by with a flight attendant (Tony) on trans-Atlantic flights has its perks- and they include: two miniature bottles of wine and an ice cream sundae.
Charles de Gaulle
- There is an "Alarme" button in the bathroom, (the first thing I encountered upon exiting the Continental terminal), bright red and shiny, in case of what, exactly? The bathroom had one individual stall, with a fully closing door, like a little room. This makes me wonder how ghastly American bathroom stalls must seem to someone accustomed to these, so invasive of privacy with inches and inches of space at the bottom of every door, enough to see the next person's shoelaces, their slouched pants. Ugh.
-All the signage is lettered in soft-looking, glowing characters against blue backgrounds, directing one everywhere calmly in both French and (British) English translations ; terminals are called "Halls," something which is more confusing than you might think
-Extremely simple airport shuttle, whizzing me all the way to the metro station. Yes, please.
-Teeny weeny subway tickets, barely bigger than a slip of fortune cookie paper, made from stiff, magnetic-stripped card board, listing one's origin and destination in small, neat script. Zip, zip.
-Metro train cars inside are all dingy chunks of primary colors -yellow, red, blue- and oh, mine was completely empty, save for a surly, hooded youth in the back, making it drip with ripeness for a mugging. It dipped under and over ground again and again and again.
-We pass lots of really crappy suburbs, run-down houses, lots of tiled roofs in rust color, a preponderance of yellow-beige paint on houses, adding to an already vaguely 70s -ish feel.
-Tons of graffiti in uninspired block letters, with predictable shading (I'm sorry, a 3rd grader could have done that, boys). Shouldn't foreign graffiti be more unintelligible than domestic, given that even the American kind seems to be constructed of mostly arcane proper nouns and internal references? In reality, it's about on par.
-Wow French subways have their own version of people making their "Attention, ladies and gentlemen" announcements, to beg for money. Sorry folks, the smallest I have is 20 Euros and I'm not parting with that - even though you do look pretty pathetic.
-Jesus, graffiti everywhere.
-Lots of industrial buildings, a forest of acronyms like CEPRIM and MIDAR.
-Paris metro in general = an uneasy, clammy gloom I've never felt in NYC subways.
-(From the window) It's hard not to overgeneralise, but the cars really are all smaller, dehydrated little snouty-nosed, malnourished continental things.
-Orly Airport is in the south of Paris, and it's where they put all the "other" (read: southern hemisphere) outbound flights (ahem).
-Though it's almost startlingly easy to get from Charles de Gaulle to Orly, stopping midway at St Michel/Notre Dame, just because you feel like you should use your interminable layover to get around a bit- have a coffee and a pain au chocolat- while a worthy goal, will detract significantly from the easiness of your trip for the following reasons: a faulty memory (in general), a horrible sense of direction, an un-clearly remembered and complex web of up/down/sideways/all around escalators, and (slightly snippy) ticket agents hidden behind voice-muffling glass giving directions in casually-pronounced French.
- Back in the train (after at least ten vaguely excited minutes). Transfer to the OrlyVal, an absurdly high-speed shuttle train (the kind with the two sliding glass doors and the wooshing and the elevated track). I tried to use the wrong miniature ticket (I had now accrued 3 of them) to enter the shuttle's turnstile. Thrice. And though in a beautifully constructed French sentence (my only one of the day, or since) I reassured the attendant emphatically that it had to be the right one, closer inspection revealed that it wasn't. Fail.
Orly
-Red-walled shops
-The super advanced, "stick-your-hands-in" kind of hand dryers
-Checkered bags (the plasticky, dollar store kind) being used as luggage. Hello again, Africans.
-Shiny, shiny floors
-Cafes displaying an assortment of limp, reserved, and austere French sandwiches
-Terminal 24, departing for Casablanca, all the way down miles and miles of vacant airport corridors, past passport check fences made to corral hundreds of cattle-like travelers, now empty of everyone but me, strolling leisurely through them like a ghost.
-Dozens of patron-less, duty free shops, even this deep into the airport, with bored attendants in shirts and ties, and in pant suits, each store front spilling expensive-looking light into the dim hall, oozing around wine bottles, and bright sporty-colored shirts, and glinty watches.
-Waiting in terminal, I followed a sign marked "toilettes" and found an echoingly empty bathroom with pink painted cows grazing across doors painted like a dreamy, pastel field. Only later did I find out that I went into the women's bathroom by mistake. The mens' room was painted with blue cows. Of course.
- Okay, after being up for 24+ hours, I can barely stay awake. My body keeps feeling like its skin is a suit of clothes it wants to fall out of. Now, when I need not just coffee, but a quantity of coffee, a deluge of coffee, these damn Parisians keep charging me the equivalent of 6 dollars for, like, a Dixiecup full of (admittedly excellent) coffee. Cela ne marchera pas.
-And boarding. Here we go.
To be continued. More about everything, soon.
-Flying stand-by with a flight attendant (Tony) on trans-Atlantic flights has its perks- and they include: two miniature bottles of wine and an ice cream sundae.
Charles de Gaulle
- There is an "Alarme" button in the bathroom, (the first thing I encountered upon exiting the Continental terminal), bright red and shiny, in case of what, exactly? The bathroom had one individual stall, with a fully closing door, like a little room. This makes me wonder how ghastly American bathroom stalls must seem to someone accustomed to these, so invasive of privacy with inches and inches of space at the bottom of every door, enough to see the next person's shoelaces, their slouched pants. Ugh.
-All the signage is lettered in soft-looking, glowing characters against blue backgrounds, directing one everywhere calmly in both French and (British) English translations ; terminals are called "Halls," something which is more confusing than you might think
-Extremely simple airport shuttle, whizzing me all the way to the metro station. Yes, please.
-Teeny weeny subway tickets, barely bigger than a slip of fortune cookie paper, made from stiff, magnetic-stripped card board, listing one's origin and destination in small, neat script. Zip, zip.
-Metro train cars inside are all dingy chunks of primary colors -yellow, red, blue- and oh, mine was completely empty, save for a surly, hooded youth in the back, making it drip with ripeness for a mugging. It dipped under and over ground again and again and again.
-We pass lots of really crappy suburbs, run-down houses, lots of tiled roofs in rust color, a preponderance of yellow-beige paint on houses, adding to an already vaguely 70s -ish feel.
-Tons of graffiti in uninspired block letters, with predictable shading (I'm sorry, a 3rd grader could have done that, boys). Shouldn't foreign graffiti be more unintelligible than domestic, given that even the American kind seems to be constructed of mostly arcane proper nouns and internal references? In reality, it's about on par.
-Wow French subways have their own version of people making their "Attention, ladies and gentlemen" announcements, to beg for money. Sorry folks, the smallest I have is 20 Euros and I'm not parting with that - even though you do look pretty pathetic.
-Jesus, graffiti everywhere.
-Lots of industrial buildings, a forest of acronyms like CEPRIM and MIDAR.
-Paris metro in general = an uneasy, clammy gloom I've never felt in NYC subways.
-(From the window) It's hard not to overgeneralise, but the cars really are all smaller, dehydrated little snouty-nosed, malnourished continental things.
-Orly Airport is in the south of Paris, and it's where they put all the "other" (read: southern hemisphere) outbound flights (ahem).
-Though it's almost startlingly easy to get from Charles de Gaulle to Orly, stopping midway at St Michel/Notre Dame, just because you feel like you should use your interminable layover to get around a bit- have a coffee and a pain au chocolat- while a worthy goal, will detract significantly from the easiness of your trip for the following reasons: a faulty memory (in general), a horrible sense of direction, an un-clearly remembered and complex web of up/down/sideways/all around escalators, and (slightly snippy) ticket agents hidden behind voice-muffling glass giving directions in casually-pronounced French.
- Back in the train (after at least ten vaguely excited minutes). Transfer to the OrlyVal, an absurdly high-speed shuttle train (the kind with the two sliding glass doors and the wooshing and the elevated track). I tried to use the wrong miniature ticket (I had now accrued 3 of them) to enter the shuttle's turnstile. Thrice. And though in a beautifully constructed French sentence (my only one of the day, or since) I reassured the attendant emphatically that it had to be the right one, closer inspection revealed that it wasn't. Fail.
Orly
-Red-walled shops
-The super advanced, "stick-your-hands-in" kind of hand dryers
-Checkered bags (the plasticky, dollar store kind) being used as luggage. Hello again, Africans.
-Shiny, shiny floors
-Cafes displaying an assortment of limp, reserved, and austere French sandwiches
-Terminal 24, departing for Casablanca, all the way down miles and miles of vacant airport corridors, past passport check fences made to corral hundreds of cattle-like travelers, now empty of everyone but me, strolling leisurely through them like a ghost.
-Dozens of patron-less, duty free shops, even this deep into the airport, with bored attendants in shirts and ties, and in pant suits, each store front spilling expensive-looking light into the dim hall, oozing around wine bottles, and bright sporty-colored shirts, and glinty watches.
-Waiting in terminal, I followed a sign marked "toilettes" and found an echoingly empty bathroom with pink painted cows grazing across doors painted like a dreamy, pastel field. Only later did I find out that I went into the women's bathroom by mistake. The mens' room was painted with blue cows. Of course.
- Okay, after being up for 24+ hours, I can barely stay awake. My body keeps feeling like its skin is a suit of clothes it wants to fall out of. Now, when I need not just coffee, but a quantity of coffee, a deluge of coffee, these damn Parisians keep charging me the equivalent of 6 dollars for, like, a Dixiecup full of (admittedly excellent) coffee. Cela ne marchera pas.
-And boarding. Here we go.
To be continued. More about everything, soon.
Posts
1 comment:
Well I'm glad you're not dead. My flight back was horrible. My delicate bum has never known the injustice of a Continental coach class seat.
Post a Comment