Paris - Day 1: Les vaches disent moo!

It was my intention to write and post daily from Paris about our trip but upon our arrival, I discovered that my laptop wasn't working. I did, however, keep a daily diary and over the next five days, will share the experience that passes for travel these days.

Well, wasn’t that special!

We have arrived in Paris and are finally settled in our hotel room despite the best efforts of a significant number of people on both sides of the Atlantic.

The thrill of air travel starts here

It started at the airport. We were to fly from Ottawa to Toronto and then from Toronto to Paris. It sounded pretty simple to me but apparently, simple is not in the lexicon of either Air Canada or any of those who work at airports. 

Our flight to Toronto had been cancelled due to the possibility of inclement weather. This is Canada; inclement weather is part of the culture and our airlines even fly in blizzards. Interestingly the flights one hour before and one hour after our scheduled flight were not cancelled so apparently Air Canada believes that they can now accurately predict weather to within an hour of it happening, something the national weather service must really envy. They can’t get the five day forecast right. It’s either that or else Air Canada believes that we’re so stupid, we actually believe they cancelled the flight because of the possibility of bad weather rather than because the flight wasn’t full. 

After sympathetically explaining the situation to us, the ticket agent dutifully took our passport, scanned it (remember this part) and then with a sincere and synthetic smile told us she would do what she could to get us on the earlier flight so that we wouldn’t miss our connection in Toronto to Paris.

How sweet of her but quite frankly, if they had just gone ahead with the regularly scheduled flight, we wouldn’t have had to worry about making our connection. Maggie told me to calm down because, we’re going to Paris so let’s be magnanimous and so for her, I was; even as I went through security.

The thrill continues

It doesn’t seem to matter how much stuff I put in the trays to go through the x-ray machine, I’m going to set off the alarm when I walk through the metal detector. This of course, triggers having to take off my shoes, undo my belt and being wanded and frisked. The security agent even stuck his hands in my pants which I thought was a touch personal for a first date.

After being poked, prodded and searched, we make inside the secure part of the airport. There are no terrorists here. They’ve been screened out by the minimum wage agents back at the security screening area. Even though this is a domestic flight, my passport and my boarding pass have already been checked three times, primarily by people who appear to me to be functionally illiterate. I feel like I’m behind the Iron Curtain back in the good old days and keep expecting two guys in leather trench coats to appear from nowhere and demand, “Papers, please!”

My passport has been seen by more
people than Paris Hilton's vagina

This, of course, doesn’t prevent Air Canada from two more checks. One at the boarding gate by a woman who was so distracted by thed burden of responsibility that comes with being the airline's gatekeeper, it was all she could do to check the passport against the name on the boarding pass and then ‘manually’ (remember that scanning thing at the original ticket counter) typed in each passenger's seat number. It threatened to overwhelm her to the point where she kept losing her place on her computer keyboard. Apparently the bar code on an Air Canada boarding pass is for aesthetic purposes only.

Fifty feet further down the boarding ramp, at the door of the plane, one more member of the crack Air Canada security team stands ever vigilant in his blue blazer to check our passports one more time. Quite frankly, if I was a terrorist and had made it undetected this far in the process, that plane would be pretty much toast now. It's a frightening thought that Blazer Bob is the last line of defence against terrorism at the aircraft door.

On board, there is no place for Maggie and I to put our one piece of individual hand luggage we're each carrying. Air Canada has a strict rule about each passenger being permitted only one piece of carry-on luggage but they don't enforce it which results in  many people bringing on two and three pieces which they jam into the overhead compartments without any thought given to the fact that they are taking the space used by others. It leaves many of us having nowhere to put our luggage except under the seat in front of us. This results in spending the flight with nowhere for your feet and arriving at your destination  hobbled over like Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame.

Air Canada:  proudly celebrating
75 years of mediocrity

Basically, Air Canada’s boarding and security procedures are as redundant and poorly thought out as their onboard hospitality is cheap. It is a private sector business run as if it was organized and operated by government bureaucrats. Nothing is done on time. Everything is bureaucratic and involves processes that make no sense to anyone but themselves although I will admit that the bag of eight bite-sized pretzels they gave each of us as our in-flight snack was quite good. 

We land in Toronto, one hour ahead of schedule. The weather, by the way, was just fine; sunny and clear. I believe Air Canada didn’t think we’d notice or they hoped we might have forgotten why they canceled the original flight. Interestingly, according to the arrivals and departures screens scattered around Pearson Airport in Toronto, our original flight was the only flight cancelled due to the threat of inclement weather or…..for any reason as it turns  out.

I was not happy. 

I don’t like bad service at the best of times but redundant process and unnecessary disruptions to what I’m paying for drive me crazy. My back is sore from the uncomfortable seat and generally the big trip is just not off to a good start. 

I tell Maggie that I need to leave the airport’s secure passenger area to reclaim my inner harmony. I walk for twenty miles through the terminal and finally find an exit. I go out for a cigarette, then another and then three more although I didn't need cigarettes to make smoke. I've had smoke coming out of my ears for an hour.

When I have regained some semblance of inner peace, Maggie and I look for food and discover we have a choice of two restaurants. They are side by side and competing with each other to see who can provide roadhouse type food with with the trendiest names, no flavour and for the highest price. This eventually leads to smoking more cigarettes.

I was beginning to think that simply staying in the parking lot of Pearson Airport in Toronto and smoking cigarettes might be preferable to dealing with Air Canada again but Maggie dragged me over to security where once again we went through the process of keeping our skies safe.

At the end of the long serpentine line of people waiting to go through a security check, a young woman looks at our passports and then points us to a line that leads to a station in the security area. This is intended to speed up the line and is done in the belief that we are too stupid to pick the least busy station for ourselves.

Waiting to be frisked or as some think
of it, learning how to moo.

Once again, I empty my pockets, take off my watch, my ring and my sunglasses, pull out my laptop and send everything through the x-ray machine in a big plastic tray while I walk through the metal detecttor and trigger another alarm. I am of the opinion that if I walked through naked (don’t visualize please, let’s just move along), I would still trigger the alarm. 

This leads to undoing my pants again, more wanding, more frisking, poking, prodding and a new option. I am given the choice between a fully naked body search (presumably in a private room) or a full body scan. If I had been dealing with the cute blonde security agent in the other line, I might have gone for the full body search but I was dealing with a little guy with a scraggly mustache named Garth so I opted for the machine. They found nothing and told me to do up my pants, get my stuff and move along as if the entire slow down at security had been my fault.

We sat at the boarding gate for an hour only to go through the same basic Air Canada process once again which means that my passport has now been checked no less than seven times and I haven’t left the country yet.

On board, we are told to strap ourselves ourselves in just in case the plane hits something, like a mountain or another plane and we wait. We wait and we wait and we wait. Remember that hour we made up by getting put on an earlier flight? It’s gone. We sit in the plane for an hour and then longer and even our captain tells us he has no idea why we’re not being given the go ahead to leave.

I decide to watch a movie. The entertainment system doesn’t work although we’re having no difficulty getting all the Air Canada announcements across it. 

Finally and I do mean finally, we take off. We are now 90 minutes behind schedule but the friendly Air Canada flight crew assures us that they want us to have a lovely flight (after having lectured us for twenty minutes about everything we are not permitted do during the flight and the disasters that might befall the plane). They tell us that they will soon be serving a hot meal and are rebooting the entertainment system. I can hardly wait. 

This is what was promised - what
we were given was sawdust in a
plastic box.

Stale movies and even more stale food; how much better can life get?

We arrived in Paris. I could barely walk by this time due to my arthritis and spending seven hours in a seat designed by someone with scoliosis and a bad attitude. We go through….get ready for it…..passport control and then pick up our luggage. Maggie is convinced that we will have to go through Customs. As dear as she is, she is wrong. There is no customs and immigration. We picked up our luggage and I headed for the nearest exit to light up, if only to disguise the smoke coming out of my ears once again.

Death Race 2000 - Paris traffic

We secured a cab and became part of what the French refer to as traffic but I think is more aptly named Death Race 2000. There is no such thing as sticking to a traffic lane. In fact, traffic lanes are as non existent as Air Canada efficiency. People seem to pick lanes at random  and if there isn't one they like, well....they create a new lane.

Scooters and motorcycles zip up the highway riding the white dotted line between cars and trucks. They weave in and out with a care in the world and I envy how wonderful it must be to be so oblivious to being that close to dying,

Cars and trucks move back and forth across what ever happens to be pavement with an unbelievable faith in the brakes on other people’s cars. Horns are part of the language as are hand gestures and I quickly become aware that, in France, it is more important to express yourself than to keep at least one hand on the wheel. In France, they take freedom of speech very, very seriously indeed.

The cab ride from the airport to the hotel took an hour and I did the entire trip with my eyes closed.

But we arrived safely and all we have to do is check in and then we can lie down, grab a nap and later go out and start to enjoy this famous and beautiful city. What could possibly be simpler? 

Despite the fact that the room has been booked for four weeks, it wasn’t ready. They were still cleaning it even though it was well past two o’clock in the afternoon. The desk manager assures us that it will be ready in a few minutes so with a remarkable amount of self-restraint on my part, I suggest to Maggie that we leave our luggage at the desk, walk up the street and get something to eat. I tell her that the alternative is that she can stand back and watch me impersonate Robert deNiro in Taxi Driver while I go postal on the lobby of our hotel.

Maggie opts to go for lunch.

A Paris cafe - an island of sanity in a world
that has lost its mind.

We walked up to a small café, sat at a table outside and ordered two café crèmes and something to eat. An hour later, we returned to the hotel, retrieved our luggage and room key and walked over to the elevator. When the door opened it became clear that there will be multiple trips required.

The elevator is four feet wide and two feet deep. A sign on the elevator reads “4 personnes seulement’ and it be came clear to me that the elevator was designed by Schmurfs. We took our luggage up in multiple stages and I was thankful that I studied the portage method used by my ancestors to lug their canoes and camping gear around rapids and water falls when they were exploring Canada two hundred years ago.

Our hotel room was still not ready. The hallway was littered with big blue canvas bags of dirty linen to the point where it was almost impossible to get off the elevator. The maid was still in the room changing the sheets. She rushed out of the room to apologize and to move bags out of my way so that there is a place to stand in the hall while she finished making the bed. I came to the conclusion that our hotel is owned and operated by Air Canada.

The actual flying time from Ottawa to Paris is seven hours if you could fly directly from Ottawa. We left our home at 2:00 pm on Thursday and arrived at our hotel at 2:00pm Friday (Paris time). It took 18 hours when you factor in the time difference and add going through all the lines, the passport controls, the processes, the waiting, the connecting, the poking and the prodding.

It was eighteen hours of being treated like cattle by a system so poorly conceived and implemented it merely provides the illusion of security and in the end accomplishes nothing except harass and interfere with every day people going about their every day business. In France, cattle are called les vaches but like a French driver's hand signals, the language les vaches speak is universal. \

Professional mooers

There was a time when cattle at the slaughter house were herded like air travelers are now. That process too was poorly conceived and implemented and resulted in delays, incredible waste and lost productivity. An autistic woman named Temple Grandin redesigned the process against considerable odds and despite much scorn. Her system is now the gold standard for moving cattle efficiently and “humanely” through long lines.  It has become clear to me that moving people efficiently and humanely is not of much concern to either those who handle airport security or the major airlines, especially Canada’s pride, Air Canada. 

Amateur mooers

My opinion is that if government and airlines are going to treat us like cattle at an abattoir, the very least they could do is hire Temple Grandin to redesign their process so that we could at least get some of the bloody lines moving. In the alternative, I suppose the rest of us could stand around in those absurdly long and slow moving lines and simply moo at the top of our longs until security and airline staff are driven insane.

That won’t happen though. The process imposed on us is designed by thoughtless and clueless bureaucrats and if you are being honest, when was the last time you saw a bureaucracy develop anything that was efficient?

Right….me neither. On the bright side, however, thanks to Air Canada and the folks who work at airports I am  now trilingual. I speak English, French and I can now moo with the best of 'em!

Tomorrow: The Louvre, the Metro and assimilation.

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

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