Paris: May 24: Flying Home

We had breakfast in our apartment before heading to the airport to fly home. I wanted my last pastry/meal in Paris to be an appropriately traditional pastry. I selected a pain au chocolat, a selection that I'm surprised I made. (I thought I wouldn't be in the mood for more chocolate after the mousse the previous night.)

Incidentally, I took a few pictures this day. Di Yin took four. The latter link goes to her first picture from this day (picture #47). If you're in slideshow mode and see a picture of Di Yin mailing postcards, you've cycled back to the beginning of the album and are viewing pictures from an earlier day that I already linked to.

The streets were empty at 7am. Maybe people in Paris start work later than in the states? The train we took that ends at the airport, however, was rather full, so maybe it's just that people up early for work aren't walking around outside.

From the train, we saw a train fully laden with new cars.

Traveling was easy. We had no problems taking the train to the airport, checking-in, going through security, flying, or getting a shuttle to take us home once we landed. We got selected for a random inspection at customs, but even this luggage search was fast and the inspector courteous and friendly.

We flew home non-stop on Air France. The eleven-hour flight was alright, a surprising fact given that there were no personal, on-demand TVs for each person but only shared screens above the airplane's corridors. I enjoyed the main courses of both our meals. We were a bit nervous about flying Air France given our bad experience on KLM on the way to Paris--KLM and Air France are close partners--but I think the discomfort we experienced on the KLM flight was mainly due to sitting next to a large man who slightly overfilled his seat. On this flight we had no such difficulties; for much of the flight I sat next to Di Yin and a sleeping baby (who certainly does not fill up its seat). Nevertheless, I was still slightly irritated by the fact that the armrests didn't entirely rotate up to disappear between the seats. Di Yin and I couldn't share our two seats as if they were a couch. Regardless, I think the flight was perfectly fine and would do it again.

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