Continental Awfulness

We left out of Newark, which now has my vote for the world's worst airport. Readers of this blog may remember my saying that too many signs is just as bad as not enough signs, and that's definitely the case at that airport. I'm pretty smart and I've traveled a lot, but I had no idea what was going on.

We finally get to the Continental terminal and I presume everything will be alright because Newark is Continental's big hub so they should have it under control. Nope. We wandered through 2 different levels of the terminal (most air terminal have upper and lower levels, Continental adds a bonus middle level, and that's where we needed to go, not that there was any sign that said so. Once on the mid-level, we looked for the right place to check in and kept getting redirected. Finally we got to the check-in and there were about 20 passengers and 1 airline person. No problem. Airline people don't check you in, you do it yourself. I stand at a computer terminal and swipe my passport and all that stuff. It spits out a baggage ticket and the one airline person comes and puts it on. Does she then put my luggage on a belt? Nope. I don't think there even is a belt. She points at a very young man standing across the corridor near a cart with a few bags on it and says "Give it to him." I'm serious- "Give it to him." So we drag the bag over and give it to him and hope for the best. It didn't get any better after that, but I'll spare you.

The next morning we arrived in Paris. It all went very smoothly. I thought they had customs in Paris, but if it was there I missed it. I used a tour company to arrange the details here and they sent a guide with the car to the airport. We have been to Paris several times and are not in need of a guide. I think the guide knew that, but being a guide still felt the need to talk the entire way over to the hotel. It actually got annoying after a while and we were glad to be left to ourselves.

My one travel tip here is to take the latest flight you can, because if you take a 6PM flight to Europe, (1) you won't sleep, and (2) you'll get to your hotel at 8:30 AM and your room won't be available for at least 4 hours, maybe more. We took a 9:30 flight, slept a bit, and got to the hotel and into our room at noon.

Because this is a short trip, we had to do the quick and dirty route to overcoming jet lag. That meant taking a 3 hour nap and then trying to stay up as late as we could to overcome the fact that midnight here is 6PM at home. This is not a reliable method but it kind of works sometimes. It took us about an hour to actually wake up, but we managed and set out. The hotel is near the President's palace. He apparently lunches at the hotel frequently. Many of the other building in the neighborhood are government buildings, so you can imagine how exciting it was on a summer Sunday afternoon.

We figured le Marais, the young/gay/Jewish/upscale shopping neighborhood would be out best bet and it was. We even ran into two sets of people from Philadelphia at one store. Bought some stuff. Walked around and then went back to the hotel to get ready for dinner. This is getting too long so I'll do dinner separately.