Blitz visit to Paris

In previous posts in this blog, I have described twice my short stays in Paris, around than 24 hours. Last Friday, I think that I took the concept of short visit too far: I was in Paris just less than four hours.

A colleague had to cancel a business trip just the evening before, so I had to book a plane for Friday morning, at 7:25. It meant that I had to wake up at 5:55, arghhh!!!!!! To my surprise, when I woke up, I read that my flight had been cancelled. Air France's Customer Centre was closed at that time (totally normal, by the way) so I decided to go to the airport, anyway. Once there, I realized that it was impossible to fly to Paris on time, so I rushed to the office to book a train to Paris.

All this mess meant that I took the train at 9:00, I arrived at Gare de l'Est at 13:00, I took a taxi to the meeting and... I was back to the airport Charles de Gaulle at 17:00. Four hours were enough to realise that I would not like to drive in Paris at all: there are a lot (but a lot) of cars and traffic jams, drivers are quite aggresive, there are a lot of bikers not very aware of the fact that they are weaker than cars and, on top of that, people just jump to the street when they want to cross, totally ignoring traffic lights and zebra crossings.

The flight back to Frankfurt was not easier. First, the plane was parked just at the end of the Charles de Gaulle Airport, beyond inhabited areas in the last corner of it. It was a small plane, not the Airbus Air France promised me when I booked the ticket. It meant that it could not fly very fast, so we were a bit delayed in Frankfurt. Then, after landing to Frankfurt, after the usual 15 minutes drive to the finger, we had to wait longer because the stairs were not fit for such plane and because a huge Airbus A340 was standing in our way for five minutes.

When I arrived home, I was the happier man on Earth, after a long and complicated day which started too early. And the next day I was going to Berlin with my parents...