Note:

This post is a “crosspost” from an old Blogspot blog I had for a couple months when I was 19.

Posting online again after an 18-year hiatus – and as a tactic to overcome self-consciousness and mortification, I’ll jump into the deep end with this. Now that I have my own kids, I think some of it holds up okay for a 19-year old. The post from 2007 (note the emoticons instead of emojis):

Liberté, egalité, futilité…

Charles DeGaulle Airport, Paris. An exercise in futilité. I’ll try to get a picture of the floorplan on here so you can see what I’m talking about :o)

So the way it seems to me, this is what happened: Monsieueuer French Airport Designer Person graduated from French Airport Designing Université or wherever with a 3.9 and was sore, so he said (in a stereotypical French accent): Scratch what the professors and the ergonomic airport design experiences of the past centuré have taught us… I am going to throw cautión to the wind, and creaté my piecé dé resistancé, and show them who’s bossé!
And thus was born the airport at which a transfére could be compared to… nothing else, words just plain escape me :0)

So all the terminals are, for all practical purposés, disconnected, so you arrivé at one, then you look around trying to find the signs that will help you get to where you need to go, but the only signs you can see with the naked eye are the big colorful ones saying “Duty Free” or “Sans Dutéé” in the French. They looked like a cross between poison dart frogs from the Amazon and the 2012 London Olympics logo. So I walked a little bit not seeing the signs I needed… because they were small. A third the size of the aforementión-ed signs, and conveniently hidden behind the giant neon Duty Free amphibians from London (the signs). But of course later on they compensate for this, trust me. So I went downstairs. Because that’s where the bus was. Oh yes, there are buses. Which is logical. Because the terminals aren’t connected. Which is not so much. The buses go around the outside of the airport dropping people off.

So they check my boarding pass once, just to make sure I’m going to the right place… then the same chick checks it again. ‘Cause she forgot she checked it already. Or so I thought at the time, in retrospect, I think that’s just how they do things. So after about 10 minutes on the bus which weaves around all over the place chasing after all the little baggage carrying carts and making 270-degree turns trying to avoid all the other buses running around, because the terminals aren’t connected, I think we even passed under a Cessna and over a C-17, but finally got to Terminal E.

So I go in there, and they check the boarding pass, to make sure that I’m in the right place. So I continue down the hall, toward my gate, following the Duty Liberté signs around, and as I’m making my way to the securité check down the hall 2 more people stop me to check my boarding pass. Then I reach securité. They check it again at the back of the line. I get to the front of the line. They check it again. I do the whole security thing, they check the laptop case, I take my laptop out, I take my shoes off, put the stuff through the machiné, walk through the metal detector, put my shoes on, put my laptop in the case, walk 3 steps, where they check my laptop case (oui, again), and again, ask me where I’m going… just to make sure, again, that I’m going in the right directión, walk another 20, and they check my boarding pass again. And kindly point me in the right directión. Which just so happens to be the only directión I can go, but it was still rather nice of them.

Then I head towards my gate. Which happens to be at another terminal. Which isn’t even ON the piture above! Oui, it’s on purpose, in a buréáucrátic sense it’s the same terminal. In realité, it’s another 15 minute bus-ride away… :o) So before I get on the bus, they ask where I’m going, just so I’m headed in the right directión. After the bus ride I arrived at the final terminal (and I was beginning to understand why they call it a ‘terminal’), where they proceeded to check my pass a further two times…

Now you have to under that in almost all of these cases, they checked it at a place where there really was only one directión I could possibly go until the next check, and there was only one directión I could have come from since the last check… So by the time I reached the plane a total of 8 random airport personnel, 3 random security guards, 22 random passengérs and the entire Board of Diréctors of Air Francé (oui, even the CEO) asked to see my boarding pass. But it was cool, the whole way I was about neck-and-neck with a guy who looked like Duke Nukem in the flesh…