Another laugh was the security check as you drive into the airport. The guards check every to see if people have passports- they don’t look at them and then they look in the boot. They don’t open anything just look. Maybe they are looking for big red balls with fuses that say bomb- who knows? Doesn’t seem to achieve much.
Another piece of useless item to add to our list is this train pictured that takes you about 200m from the terminal to the gate. It would of been quicker to walk, an odd thing is it had no wheels just heaps of bags like a hovercraft. it must have cost a fortune but was stupid
It held about 50 people but 100 fit somehow and leaves every 5 minutes. It would take only 2 minutes to walk if you could and you wouldn’t need 6 trips to empty a plane full of passengers.
There a quiet a few specialty shops at the airport one of my favourites was the fruit and vegetable gift shop. Here you could buy a beautifully round cantaloupe in a pretty cardboard box for 13000 yen that’s about 140 Australian. Peaches were about 30 dollars each, but the most beautiful peaches you have ever seen. And my favourite a gift box with bows and ribbons with six mushrooms for about 80 dollars.
The convenience store near our gate had some great stuff too..15 inch long pickled radishes. Every type of cryopacked sea creature and gizzard and some great hello kitty trinkets.
The plane is a Boeing 777 and is chockers, fortunately we got exit rows seats which made it a bit more comfortable but there wasn’t much shoulder room.
The flight heads over china, the Siberian dessert and flies high over the Russian federation nearly as north as you can go. Moscow is quiet a bit to the south of the flight path. it then crosses Finland, Denmark, Holland and Belgium and into France missing Poland and Germany.
The entertainment system wasn’t as high tech and didn’t have the choices like the Qantas plane we had earlier but they had a pretty cool camera mounted under the plane. You could see the plane take off and land from a camera in the nose and then there was one under the plane so you could see everywhere it was going over- sort of like a live Google Earth.
Back earlier we mentioned weird Japanese stuff- well this flight had a interesting fashion. Many of the people were wearing face masks, don’t know if it was fashion or a disease in the cabin.. mmm weird. The meals were ok there was a choice of beef burger meat or grilled cod miso flavoured and cuttlefish and seaweed salad- not hard to guess what we had.
We got into Paris about 4PM getting through the airport was a breeze it would have only taken about 20 minutes to get out. We then picked up our lovely European car..there were some nice Peugeots and a lovely VW Golf…but no we got the Chevy Nibira.. it’s a Daewoo or a Holden Viva back home.
We ordered sat nav in the vehicle so after getting lost a few times while we programmed the thing we got to Metz for the night.
The trip took about 2 and a bit hours we got to our hotel. Weren’t too hungry and it was about 4AM Australian time so we had a couple of beers at the bar and went to bed.
