The trip there
Well, I’m in Paris now. We went to the airport at around noon in Houston and got checked in at the Air France terminal. There was the three of us and about six bag worth of souvenirs and gifts for friends and family in Iran. My Mom had the thankless job of putting that all together and making sure that no one is forgotten. She forgot to weigh the bags before getting to the airport though. Every single bag was overweight. We had to redistribute the weight of each bag into this overflow box that Air France gave us, and pay a ridiculous overage fee for it.
The flight from Houston to Paris was 9 hours long and just over 5000 miles. The seats each had a touch-screen where you could watch movies or TV shows. The selection was very limited. I got to catch up on my MacGyver reruns though. The monitor had an interesting feature where you could see exactly where the plane was on a world map along with time remaining and distance traveled. Anyone who knows me really well knows that I love keeping track of stuff like that. The plane took a really interesting path. We went North through Canada, and as we were going over the Atlantic Ocean, we were never more that a short distance from land. First it was Greenland, then Iceland, then Ireland, England, and eventually France.
I also got to start a book that I had been meaning to read. It’s call Persian Pilgrimages by a young Iranian born columnist named Afshin Molavi. He writes for the Washington Post and went to Iran after a long absence to explore the culture and the politics. Reading the first chapter, I started getting a strong feeling that my experiences over the next 32 days are going to be very similar to his.
The Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris really sucks. We got out of the plane third-world style down the stairs onto the tarmac and to a waiting shuttle bus that took us to one terminal where we had to wait for another bus to take us to another terminal where we had to go through security again since we had technically “left the building”. Sometimes it takes a trip out of the U.S. to realize how good we have it here. More to come…
The flight from Houston to Paris was 9 hours long and just over 5000 miles. The seats each had a touch-screen where you could watch movies or TV shows. The selection was very limited. I got to catch up on my MacGyver reruns though. The monitor had an interesting feature where you could see exactly where the plane was on a world map along with time remaining and distance traveled. Anyone who knows me really well knows that I love keeping track of stuff like that. The plane took a really interesting path. We went North through Canada, and as we were going over the Atlantic Ocean, we were never more that a short distance from land. First it was Greenland, then Iceland, then Ireland, England, and eventually France.
I also got to start a book that I had been meaning to read. It’s call Persian Pilgrimages by a young Iranian born columnist named Afshin Molavi. He writes for the Washington Post and went to Iran after a long absence to explore the culture and the politics. Reading the first chapter, I started getting a strong feeling that my experiences over the next 32 days are going to be very similar to his.
The Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris really sucks. We got out of the plane third-world style down the stairs onto the tarmac and to a waiting shuttle bus that took us to one terminal where we had to wait for another bus to take us to another terminal where we had to go through security again since we had technically “left the building”. Sometimes it takes a trip out of the U.S. to realize how good we have it here. More to come…
posted by Al Jameson, D.C. @ 5/12/2005 09:00:00 AM
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