Ahh.. Finally in the cosy comfort of my room and drinking the lousiest cup of coffee ever made in a coffee maker i can now take time and write about my trip to Philadelphia, the city in which the Declaration of Independence was signed..
How did i reach here? I had an interesting Air France Flight to Philly with a stop over at Paris... Let’s start from the beginning...
Flight to Paris....
This one was quite boring actually (to start with i had a middle seat)... The flight was on time and my journey started at 2.40 am on 10th. I just remember getting in and putting on my seat belt and i was out like a light. An hour later i was awakened from my deep slumber by a pleasant air hostess asking which meal i wanted. Meal.... at 4.00 am.. i mean i am all for the global experience but these guys really need to get meal times correct.. i guess they were going by the french time...
A veg sandwich and an orange juice later i was all awake when my eyes fell on the LCD monitor in front of me. Now where was that when i took my seat...hmm.. we will come to that later... It had a few selections for Movies, Songs, Games etc... I opted for a movie. I tuned to the nearly last part of Little Miss Sunshine and then watched a re-run later, nice movie by the way. After that i dozed off for nearly 4 hours. It was now 7 hours since we took off and another snack (another sandwich) was on its way... An hour later we had an uneventful landing in the most romantic city in the world-Paris... Local time nearly 8 something but it was still pitch dark...
5 hours Stop Over...
Ohh not at all that bad.. Charles de Gaulle airport is a fantastic and huge airport and very efficient too. Well mannered people and really helpful people. They had us, the people taking the transit flight to Philly,to our terminal which in a completely different section of the airport in under half an hour and we managed it just by reading the signboards and asking a few friendly officials. The facilities that the airport has with its buses and other services left me wondering if we will ever achieve these standards in India. Will Mumbai airport ever be a Charles de Gaulle at least in sheer size.. time will only tell... At the terminal I had nearly 4 hours to kill.. People who know me don’t even need to be told where I would have headed off too.. that’s right.. the Snack Bar where i had a choices galore of one Veg Sandwich (a plain sandwich with cheese) and a regular coffee. After that I spent some time with the local newspapers. My sincere advice to future travelers: Please carry a novel along if u have a stop over anywhere. These papers were filled with so much news about the problem that was going to faced by Germany and Poland once Russia stops it oil supply through Belarus that one more newspaper and i would have personally taken up the matter with the Russian Gov. Of course after that came the duty free shops. No marks for guessing what this Desi must have done in a duty free shop. Yup.. headed straight for the perfumes section and in 15 minutes had nearly half a dozen of them in different parts of my body and shirt. Of course there were testing strips lying for the purpose but hey with a 12 hrs old unbathed shirt who needs testing strips...
Verdict: One perfume that caught my attention was Jetlag from the AZZARO brand. Seemed a very refreshing one and a bit different from the usual "Mall Fragrance" that we have got used too...
In the liquor section I saw one brand with bottles of the shape of the Eiffel Tower and realized that without a visa this was as close as i was going to get to the Eiffel Tower.
Air Borne Again (this time window seat... yay)...
Nearly 1 pm local time we started boarding for our flight to Philly. We had to walk down to the aircraft and for the first time I felt the cold damp air of Paris on my face... felt good. Believe me it was 1 pm and we had not seen the sun clearly yet, it was that cloudy. As the flight took off i started hunting around for the Eiffel Tower. I mean i was not about to leave Paris without even setting my eyes on the Eiffel Tower, this really can’t be happening. I strained my eyes and as the flight ascended I could see this beautiful city, neat roads, nice walkways, a carting race circuit, and beautiful parks. People started becoming dots, cars becoming smaller, the landscape becoming vague, sky scrapers becoming sticks and i left my hope of ever seeing the Eiffel Tower. The flight had been turning right all this while and then i saw a familiar shape between the concrete jungle of the city... the shape that i seen in the liquor bottle in the duty free shop. Could this really be the Tower, i actually thought it would be taller? My feelings were put to rest by excitement in the rows ahead of me. 15-20 secs is all that we got of the magnificent structure as we entered the clouds and when the window cleared the sun was glaring through and we could not see anything below the clouds, our captain came online and joked "Welcome to sunniest part of Paris". 10 hours, a couple of movies, meals and some sleep later I got down in the land of Uncle Sam.
This, my friends was the story of my flight.
ohh....P.S.: Off the record Air France air hostesses are just at the ok level.. Long Live Kingfisher and Vijay Mallya.
