bonjour, par-ee

Wednesday, May 11, 2011: Paris

We arrived in Paris from Montreal on roughly a 6 ½ hour flight at 8:30am Paris time. From a Paris perspective, we had been up since roughly noon the day before (5am Tuesday Chicago time) and caught only about 1 ½ hours of sleep on the Montreal flight and then another 3 or 4 hours of sleep on the Paris flight. It was a rude awakening to hit the ground first thing Wednesday morning for a full day of activities.

When we went to London, we didn’t sleep very traditionally.  We couldn’t sleep much on the flight over to London, then took a nap when we arrived around midday. As a result, I was on Chicago time the entire week, going to bed at 4am and getting up at 7am. It was great.

This time around, we decided to try it differently and took a few Benadryl on the flight to ensure sleepiness. The seats on the plane were 3-3-3. Louis and I had the outer window and center seat. As we made our way down the aisle, we saw a man sitting in our row. He was wearing all black with two layers of trench coats. He had long curly hair and long fingernails. He smelled very French. Louis, who loves the window seat, immediately said, I’ll take the center seat. “Are you sure?” “Yes, I insist.” So we sat down, and Louis considered perhaps taking the Benadryl immediately. We had originally planned to take it right after our meal.

The dinner served was really good – meat, pasta/rice, vegetables, chocolate, bread – all the basics. On our flight, we each had our own individual TV, which had a bunch of recently released movies and TV shows available. Louis started watching the Wall Street sequel and immediately got immersed. I grew a bit concerned and asked Louis if he wanted to get some sleep. Louis, realizing his addiction to anything and everything, removed his headphones, in fear that he’d watch all of this movie and another one before thinking about sleeping.

It was Louis’ first time on Air Canada. He was not impressed. The leg room was not good for me, so it was really bad for Louis. When we got there, we were a bit groggy, but optimistic that we had at least strung along several combined hours of sleep.

Customs was rigid.

“Passport.” Show passport.

Boom boom. Stamps in our passport.

No declaration of anything was requested. Maybe the first sign of welcome to come.

We were in Paris.