I was inexplicably upgraded to “premium select” seating and service on my flight to France in April, but Delta did not impress. The flight attendants seemed unprepared and stressed and possibly understaffed. Before dinner service, several of them could be seen trying to stuff boxes of fruit juice onto the beverage carts, helter-skelter, as if they had never before seen such a contraption. At one point, a woman taking care of first class came rushing back to another attendant near us, equally harried, and hissed in a voice overheard by those of us in the front two rows, “There are 35 people I’m trying to serve!” She had a wild look about her, her eyes opened wide and her hair looking like mine after a trans-Atlantic flight, not in the first hour of the journey. But her colleague persisted in serving us, the lowly premium select passengers.
The dinner was fine. The breakfast was horrible, an unevenly cooked English muffin with cheesy egg in between the two halves, the bottom one stuck to the cardboard container which the attendants had passed out lickety split, an hour before landing. Soggy, hard and chewy in spots, and generally bland and awful. I ate two bites of it. I hope the flight attendants got to rest a few days in Paris.
A small town fifteen minutes before landing in France; the yellow field is colza, to make canola oil. It was in serious bloom all over Ile de France.
Walking a mile or more after deplaning in Paris at CDG is always somewhat painful, especially when you’re never sure of how much farther you have to go. You finally see the mass of tired people waiting, moving forward little by little toward border control. One entryway for Europeans, one for Americans and Canadians, and one for others. A quick pass-through for airlines’ crews. We wait, we budge inch by inch, we sweat, we cannot wait until we get out and get our bags and fall into a taxi into the city. There are workers passing between our differentiated lines, asking if anyone has a connecting flight. People timidly raise their hands. The signage is lacking so it’s easy for fatigued and frazzled travelers to be confused. The helpers walk away with them, showing them the way for transiting passengers. Those of us staying here arrive at the STOP line, waiting for the woman in charge to wave us forward, one by one. You scan your passport as she guides all three doorways for our line of travelers. I go through to the next stop, where there’s a real human French border guard. He says bonjour madame, stamps my passport, and telling me to have a bonne journée, sends me off into Paris.
