L'Arrivée

Technically, the flight from Toronto to Paris is 6h36m.  Practically, or, at least in our case, the total travel time was a little longer, and correspondingly more tiring.  Let me explain.  Our departure from Toronto corresponded with the end of the G20 summit.  As a result, we were advised to give ourselves lots of additional travel time to get to Pearson.  Danielle's family lives outside of Peterborough, which is usually about a 2 hr drive from Pearson.  Based on what I claimed was our departure time (1935), we took the usual 90 minutes advance arrival time, added our normal travel time, then added a couple more hours as a buffer.  This meant we left Peterborough at about 1430.  Predictably, we had no problems whatsoever en route and arrived at the airport 2h15mins after leaving.  Fine.  Apparently lots of other people has a similar idea and there seemed to be a lot of people arriving quite early for their flights, meaning we lined up for 30-40 minutes just to drop off our bags. Everyone now checks in online, or is forced to use the kiosks, so any prior advantage of online checkin is null and void.  No problems at security and we were at our gate by 1715, more than an hour before what I had said our departure was.  We decided to eat some bad airport food to pass the time and fill our tanks before the flight.  The food was slightly less bad than what we expected, but I eventually realized that my brain had been working slightly less well than I expected and that out departure time was actually 2040.  1935 was the boarding time.  Oh well.  More time to survey the crap on offer at the duty-free.

We finished our meal, and our crap-window-shopping in plenty of time for our planned boarding time.  At some in the prior hour or so, it had started raining quite heavily and the visibility seemed less than optimal, but it hard was to tell because the visibility was so bad.  At about 1950, an announcement was made that we would not be boarding for the moment because of the ongoing thunderstorm, and that we would be waiting an indefinite amount of time.  As it happened, we started boarding at around 2015, and ended up departing ~45 minutes late.

The flight itself was uneventful, and we arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport at about 1030 local time. Air temperature: hot hot hot.

Terminal 2 has a number of attached "satellite" terminals attached to it which look like giant jelly donuts covered in big grey slate tiles.  This is a totally impractical design, as only the outer corridor is large enough for humans to actually navigate - the interior corridors (leading to the washrooms, par example) are ridiculously narrow.  I spent my first 10 minutes in France waiting in this tiny curved hallway (along with many other male travellers) waiting for Danielle to emerge out of the washroom.  The donuts do look kind of cool from the air, though.

Immigration and customs was a total non-event.  I'm still not exactly convinced that we actually did what we were supposed to - the whole process took about 10 seconds.  Waited about 5 minutes for our very sensible luggage and we were out into the main part of the airport.

Busy, busy, busy.  People coming and going, airport bars/restaurants that looked like you might actually be able to get something decent "à manger", and at least half a dozen places to get your luggage shrink-wrapped. One guy had an open box full of papers that he was going to shrink-wrap.  Not a bad idea to keep your luggage from getting messed with, but what a pain when you have to cut through 27 layers of plastic to find your tooth-brush at the other end of your trip...

Thanks to the awesome http://parisbytrain.com/, I knew exactly the signs I was looking for, and we had no problems finding the trains to downtown Paris.  We ended up getting on one train, and then switching to another one that was waiting because we found out the second one was skipping a bunch of stops.  Neither train station nor train are air-conditioned, so it was was hot, sticky ride.

The first leg of our trip to our houaw was from CDG airport to Châtelet-Les Halles (world's largest "gare souterrain") via RER.  Nothing too interesting.  Only impression was that the trains and the areas surrounding the train route were pretty grubby, especially outside "le périph".  We had to laugh when the ticket collector told Danielle to take her feet off the filthy seats.

Next leg was from Châtelet-Les Halles to La Défense via RER ligne A.  Much less grubby surroundings.  The final leg was from La Défense via Transillien ligne L.  Very nice scenery at this point and very few people on the train.

The walk from the gare to our house was very pleasant and about 10 minutes.  It would have been shorter, except for the heat and dragging our baggage along the very narrow "trottoirs".

When we arrived at our house, everything was as we had hoped - very pleasant and comfortable house with everything we need and a lovely garden and sunny deck.   Our exchange-buddies (not sure what to call them) had even left us some wine, cheese, and various "produits de canard" which simultaneously excite and confound me (I love duck, but any suggestions for exactly what to do with tinned confit de canard and "canard style pôt-au-feu appreciated").  Of course, they also left us some foie gras which I'm sure we will enjoy.

We were both pretty knackered by the time we arrived at the house - roughly 1300 (700 EDT, or 14.5 hours after leaving Peterborough), so we had a short snooze before heading out to explore a bit and grab some provisions.  We found the Monoprix, which is basically a snootier (and therefore better) version of Superstore - clothing, bicycles, electronics, housewares, and groceries.  Oh, and wine beer and liquor, for stupidly low prices (more to come on that, I'm pretty sure).  Danielle was moving pretty slowly, so we just bought some basics and headed home.  Grocery prices are very reasonable in general.  The whole rabbit was particularly well-priced (more on this, probably).  My debit card worked fine, too.

Shopping was followed by a short nap and a visit from our exchange buddies' son.  Very nice fellow.

Took a bit of a walk around town and discovered a "sani-chien", which is an outdoor doggie litter box for apartment dwellers.

Ended the evening with a "salade composée" (salad) followed closely by sweaty, restless-from-jetlag sleep.