Charles de Gaulle International Airport aka: Aéroport Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle, CDG

Every time I arrived into it, I had to make my way through the queues of people at the departure gates to get outside. And the departure gates are on two levels with spiral staircases connecting them! (If there’s a lift, I never found it.) The only thing I like about it is the runway that’s also a bridge over the motorway. Oh, and the fact that the immigration officer was nice enough to stamp my passport when I asked him. :)

France is lovely and worth visiting. I don’t think the particular French security guards on my husband’s last trip to this airport were happy to be dealing with a U.S. resident, and they ended up ruining his vacation entirely. He was on his way to Spain and was just in France on a short lay-over but they decided to send him back to Chicago. They said he needed a visa, although everyone else in the world said he didn’t, including Spain. They kept him in a filthy holding cell for 10 hours while they switched his flight for him. The “lowly” security guards thought that he should be let through on to Spain but their supervisor, an unfriendly and quite rude woman, refused to allow it. A week after he was home they finally found his luggage, which the authorities had failed to locate when they decided to send him back to the States, and we did finally get a ticket voucher from American Airlines for the ruined trip. But still.. it should have never happened!

The parents and I were coming back from our vacation in Greece…
The plane from France that picked us up in Athens was 3 hours late. So..we missed our connecting flights from Paris to Atlanta, and then Atlanta to St. Louis. It was like 4am, and we’re stuck in this airport.

I get run around for about an hour trying to find an open ticket counter to get a transfer ticket…everything is closed either for renovations, or because it’s 4am…or because they saw me coming.

Finally get a guard to help me find one and get someone to help me. I speak politely, say hello and thanks and please in French…the lady at the counter takes my old tickets, types up a bunch of things, asks me all my info and such, and hands me an envelope with Air France all over it. Smiles, tells me to have a good day, and goes back behind her glass panel.

I open the envelope to see what gate I need to wait at, and inside are 3 expired coupons for free breakfast croissants at the AeroCafe. Along with my old tickets.

I go back, and tell the woman in english that I cannot get to the US on a flying crossaint, and to please do her job and print out my tickets. The guard laughed at me. Lady scoffed and printed my tickets and mumbled something in French. I thanked her, went and bought a coffee with 4 shots of espresso and extra whipped cream, and napped through the 4 hour layover.

...got yelled at by the same guard later for sleeping across a few chairs. He also yelled at my mom for smoking in the waiting area while there was a french couple smoking right near us that he didn’t say a word to. I kinda want to go back just to mess with him a bit. =P

Horrible place filled with horrible people. The French really lived up to their reputation for unfriendliness.