One night in Paris

I was just going to add a few lines about this in the first post on Rio, but then my knowledge of Hiltonian porn pushed me into creating a separate post with an irriverent title :P

I left the house in Dublin around 2 (in the photo you can see the Dart :P), got to the airport around 4 which gave me plenty of time to scrap my existing 20G seat at the bulkhead and book an emergency exit for the long haul to Rio.

The girl at the counter said it was an "Emergency Isle" which in travelling terms is the equivalent of a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow, 21F, great!.

So, several hours later I arrive in a hyperactive Paris due to an unsuprising public transport strike. By pure coincidence my dad was actually in Paris at the same time and was due to catch a flight out at 9pm. My flight on the other hand was due to arrive in at 20.15 so I thought that it would be great it we could just hug and chat for a few of minutes since I haven't seen him in a couple of months and won't for another few.

Naturally French organization ensured that no stairs could be found to let us out of the plane so we spend 15 minutes waiting to be released from our tin prison and naturally by the time I got to the gate dad had just entered the bus... Vive le France!

I called Sol and Luca, whom I was supposed to meet in Paris and we agreed that getting to Paris center was safe but there was a risk of not getting back to the airport on time due to the lazy ass metro drivers, which ment I was about to spend one hell of a night in the world's most unorganised airport (never been to Lagos tho, so it may actually be the 2nd).

Needless to say it was a bit of an adventure, I met this lovely guy called Dennis from Cameroon and we settled down as well as we could on the steel chairs which are obviously engineered at great expense by the same guys who specialize in placing sharp rocks under your towel at the beach.

Around 4 am and with only about 2 hours sleep I realized that my toes and nuts were freezing so I set off to look for some warmer place and found one, pretty close by.

Put simply there are long really thin heaters along the corridors where the automatic rollers are, these are as uncomfortable as hell to lie on but with a bit of bag-buffering turned out to be a relatively warm place to another hours or so of sleep. (Check out my bed in the pics)

When I woke up the guy from Cameroon had joined me a little further down the heater, at this stage thought my back was killing me so I set off to find a more confortable place, whilst trying to avoid David in case he thought I was trying to get away from him...

Anyway to make a long story short, after 12 hours in Paris, 3 hours of disected sleep and many pages of my book later, I dragged myself over to the gate and waited patiently for the flight to appear.

It does, together with a suspiscious screen which indicates the order of boarding and the rows in the plane...

Yeah you guessed, row 21, seat F was nowhere near the bloody Emergency Exit, it was a middle seat between what I m sure would have turned out to be two fat americans. My Silver Shadow had turned into a G-Wiz with the reliability of an Alfa...

At the end I managed to change back to my original 20G seat which I guess was ok, but there was much swearing at the Air France girl in Dublin. The plane took off and after 11 hours of watching Transformers, The Simpsons (Mike, Billy & Steffen I finally saw it!! it not great but I watched it twice anyway), Happy Potter 4 and a romantic comedy called Licence to Wed (I apologise, I was really bored and tired but I can't sleep on the plane) I arrived on the golden shores of the River of January. Ciao!