A morning in Paris-ish (Italy 2025 part 2)

One of the biggest drawbacks to the tickets I bought for this trip was that I ended up with a 6-hour layover at CDG. This is not the place for a tight connection, but 6 hours is a bit excessive at any airport. When I bought the tickets, I had grand plans to take the train into Paris and have a morning in the city... but that 6-hour layover gets eaten up fast when you have to go through passport control, store your luggage (the only place at the airport has a reputation for being slow), take the train (about 45 minutes each way), and get back with enough time to pick up luggage and go through security before hopefully getting a shower at the lounge. I also had a lot of stuff I was wanting to see at the airport itself, and in the end I decided that I was more interested in that than in having an extremely short time in Paris itself. And I'm glad that I did, because if I was planning on heading into town, the nearly hour-long wait to get through passport control would have been excruciating! Anyway, I was under the impression that Terminal 2E (where we had landed) was pretty boring and home solely to Air France, Delta, and other partners, so I was surprised to find an Air Mauritius plane right next to ours. 

Unfortunately, arriving at concourse 2E-M (don't even get me started on CDG's dumb terminal and concourse naming) meant that I wasn't able to see the famous giant cat sculpture in concourse 2E-L. This dot ad on the (extremely overcrowded) shuttle into the terminal will have to do. 

In full time-killing mode, I went for a wander around the whole Terminal 2ABCD complex, which is pretty boring apart from the interesting planes on view outside the windows. I was also hampered in photography by the presence of a bunch of fully-armed and uniformed military people wandering around the airport -- it's quite disconcerting to see people carrying very large guns around an airport terminal. (I often see similar military people on "exercise" around Italy, but I've never seen them at the airport.)

I had this whole airport break planned out, and the next stop was to take the train a few stops to Roissypole, home to terminal 3, the bus hub, and a bunch of on-airport hotels and offices. The station, I was surprised to find, is another neat brutalist building with obvious influences from ancient Roman architecture, making it one of my favorite places at CDG.

I took the train to this intermediate station with the plan of walking the rest of the way to Terminal 1. Walking around the outdoors portion of an airport is always a bit odd, but this first part is actually really nice, with a wide, partially covered walkway. At one point, I was planning on flying home with an overnight layover at CDG, and I was planning on staying at the very funky Ibis hotel on the left of the terminal building (that didn't happen in the end, as I was able to get a more exciting flight for the way home). 

I went on this walk partially to get some fresh(ish) air and exercise after a long flight, and partially for some airport sightseeing. I was surprised by how many unusual airlines I saw at CDG, maybe even more than I saw at IST last year! Air Algerie was just taxiing by, while Air Transat and World2fly were sitting at Terminal 3. 

I was also quite excited to see the Concorde! You can't really get up close to it (unlike the one at the Museum of Flight), but it's still really cool -- I wish they had put it in a better spot than just on the side of the road at a spot where most people won't get to see more than (at most) a glimpse as they drive by. 

The rather Space Age control tower is over here too...

... Along with a weird spot where you can see down to the train tracks below. I waited what seemed like a strangely long time for a train to come by (I'm used to airport people movers showing up every minute or two, but I waited here for probably around 5 minutes). 

Things went sideways a bit as I headed towards Terminal 1. Street View showed that I would have a sidewalk the whole way, with stairs leading down towards this crosswalk between the terminal and the remote parking lot, but at some point that was all demolished, leaving a very muddy grass strip to walk along and an embankment to scramble down... with all of my carry-on luggage still with me. Exciting! I ended up getting my pants and suitcase super muddy doing this... I wonder what people thought seeing that the rest of the way to Bologna. 

But I pressed on, excited by the views of the concrete cylinder that is Terminal 1 from a perspective few people see. This is a really cool building, and somewhere I've been wanting to visit for decades. 

Terminal 1 is most famous for its moving ramp tubes linking the upper levels through the circular courtyard. Sadly, I couldn't actually ride through the tubes since I wasn't flying out of Terminal 1 (a real bucket-list thing for me), but at least the smoking area at the ground floor of the courtyard was open, and even better, there was no one smoking there. This is absolutely worth a visit if you ever end up having time to kill at CDG. 

Heading inside, the ground floor is connected to the check-in level by these cool glass-and-neon spiral stairs. I had thought that there were 2 red and 2 blue stairs, but the map only shows three, so I guess it's 2 red and 1 blue. (I did notice at one point that I had been making circles around this corridor an unknown number of times without even realizing -- by the time I was here, it was past midnight home time, and I was very much tired and out of it -- so I'm not really sure of everything that was going on here.) 

At least I got to walk up a (much less interesting, modern) moving ramp on my way to the shuttle train! 

The views from the train were not quite as impressive as the views walking up, but they're still pretty good if you can get a seat at the end of the train. Disconcertingly, this train had constant announcements playing about how there are pickpockets on the train... thankfully, I didn't get pickpocketed at any point on this trip. 

My flight out was from Terminal 2F (thankfully they didn't send us to the regional jet gates at Terminal 2G, which is way out at the far end of the airport), another pretty cool building. The main terminal is a concrete tube (similar to the one at 2E which infamously collapsed in 2004), while the concourses are full glass structures that look very much like the fantasy airport terminals I was fond of drawing in high school (even though I had never been to this airport until this trip). 

The Terminal 2F lounge is pretty neat too, with lots of free snacks, nice showers, and great views through that curving glass window. It was a bit overcrowded on my visit, so I left after not hanging around for all that long in hopes of finding a quieter place in the terminal, only to come back quickly once I realized just how busy the main terminal was (I couldn't even find a restroom without a line out the door -- I mostly came back just to use the lounge's nice restrooms!). I quite like the hanging bar setups (it's hard to tell from the image, but yes, the counter/cabinet setup is hanging a foot or two off the floor). 

Finally, it was time to use the funky angled glass jetbridges to get down to the 1-year-old A220 for the short flight. When I boarded, I noticed that the cabin looked a bit beat up (even more so than the similarly-new A350, which wasn't in great shape either) and thought this must be one of their older A220s, but no -- I guess cabin maintenance isn't Air France's strong suit. (The significantly older planes I flew on Delta looked much newer in terms of their cabin quality.) We boarded a bit late, then had to wait for a good 15 minutes on the jetbridge (which was getting pretty warm even on a cloudy February day), and then not long after I boarded, the captain came out and made a very long announcement in French, followed by a much shorter English announcement saying they were going to have to completely reset the plane to fix a mechanical issue, including shutting power completely off for at least10 minutes while no one else was going to be able to board the plane. I had thought we were pretty much done with boarding since the seat map looked pretty empty, but apparently most people were traveling without seat reservations, since there turned out to be a lot more people waiting to get on, making us close to an hour late by the time everyone finally got on board and we were able to leave. That's a lot longer than I wanted to sit in these uncomfortable "business class" seats that are just economy seats with the seat next to you empty -- at least on the A220, you can get a row to yourself on the left side of the plane (which is why I was sitting over here instead of my traditional right-side seat). 

At this point, all I wanted was to get to my hotel and relax, so I was quite happy when we finally got going. The very start of the Alps were in view, but while I was hoping to get a preview of where I would be over the next few days, unfortunately it was cloudy pretty much the whole way. The rainbow on the clouds, around the plane's shadow, was a pretty neat sight!

We got a quick little cold meal on this trip, including a fruit salad that looked seriously unappetizing, some little cheese slices that I wasn't interested in, and a pastry which was actually quite good (basically a donut-shaped cream puff with nuts on the outside). 

Bologna was cloudy and rainy, and while I had planned to get a picture of the A220 from the ground upon getting off the plane, I was preoccupied by getting inside out of the rain and totally forgot. 

I then proceeded to wait at least 45 minutes for bags to be moved the 50 feet from the plane to the baggage carousel. Seriously, I have no idea what took so long, but the Italian passengers were having animated conversations about how the airport is always "broken" and they weren't surprised by this (on the other hand, the two airport employees who showed up and then had separate animated conversations into their cell phones about the slow baggage delivery seemed a bit surprised). A whole second flight arrived, got their bags, and cleared out long before any movement at my carousel. Definitely not what I wanted when we had already arrived a good bit late. At least there were bizarre ads for industrial supplies to keep us all entertained -- seriously, the screens just showed a few ads for this sort of thing on repeat, with a single wine ad occasionally mixed in. 

I was so frazzled that I didn't even get any real pictures of the Marconi Express monorail people mover that took me into town. I was also annoyed by the price tag (more expensive than the Malpensa Express for a ride that only takes a few minutes) and all of the ads (solid ads on the platform screen doors completely blocking any view of the trains from the outside, and ad wraps with dots on the train cars themselves), along with the fact that these people mover trains still have full driver cabs for some reason, with dots on the door to block any view out the front. I get that there isn't exactly a scenic view from this train route, but the complete lack of ability to get views of or from the train is obnoxious, as is just the fact that they installed all of this obnoxious advertising on a service that already costs a fortune to use. No wonder locals miss the cheaper bus connection that used to be here! 

Anyway, we'll be back tomorrow with a bit from Bologna itself. I was planning on putting that in this part, but I'm still sick and I've run out of energy to keep writing.