I can only think of one way to describe Charles De Gaulle airport, but common decency prevents me from stating it here. If you have a choice in the matter, please do not visit this airport for any reason. First we touch down and make it to our gate. We get off the airplane and into a hallway that looks like it is under construction. It is clear that this gate is just for getting off the airplane, there are no provisions (ticket counter, etc) to get back on. We travel down a dark hallway for quite some time and eventually end up in another hallway. This continues on for a while and eventually dead ends into a tram stop. There is a color coded chart on the wall, red, blue, green tram. We figure out our destination and that eventually all of the trams go to the same places. So why the different colors? Why does France have to make everything so hard? A security guard checks our passports and tickets to let us onto the tram. We get on and the tram takes off on some kind of crazy route, under the airport, around the airport, through construction, around buildings, so many twists and turns that I have no idea where we are...are we still at the airport? We get off at the correct stop, and into another hallway. Have I mentioned that everything is bland and made of concrete? Cause it is. We go down this hallway and hit security. It's very fast and we get eye rolls when we don't speak French, but we make it through. I get flagged to the side, and they want to hand check my backpack...I left a bottle of water in there. They mutter something rude I am sure under their breath and throw it away. Cleared security. We then take another hallway and it comes up into the area underneath all of the gates. There is a little cafe, some very expensive shops (Rolex, the Monte Blanc pen store, that type of stuff) and that is it. Nowhere to really sit down and eat, nowhere to get little souvenirs (the word is even French!), nothing. We grab some stuff at the cafe, pay with a credit card from America with no chip inside (Europe uses chipped cards for all transactions, we use magnetic stripes) so the lady had to dust off an old terminal with a mag stripe reader on it, LOL. Then we made our way up a level to the terminal itself. It was visually stunning, all metal and glass in a sail shape. Awesome! But alas, a large glass enclosed area with the sun shining down on it is not just neat to look at it, it also doubles as a greenhouse. As we start to melt, we sit down to wait a couple of hours for our flight.
It gets better. So we start to board our flight. Just like normal. Except when we walk though the gate and into the corridor, the corridor has no plane...just some stairs down...and outside. We and the other passengers then walk down a flight of stairs and down to the tarmac. There we find two airport buses. Each bus actually has our Air France flight number on it. I am now worried that the plane doesn't exist and that they are going to bus us to Bulgaria. Eventually all the passengers get on the buses and away we go. Another labyrinthine trip though the bowels of Charles De Gaulle airport. Eventually we make it to another stairwell leading up, they exact same thing we just came down. We all go up, and finally, a plane!
Why they operate this way at CDG airport, I will never know...all I can say is that it was an experience!
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