One of the details I missed while booking my flight on Qatar Airways was that my flight would be arriving in Terminal 1 at Paris Charles de Gaulle. This is the oldest terminal, and as we were parking at our gate, I could see that the other airlines using this terminal were the likes of Turkish Airways, Saudia, Egyptair... ALL from Muslim countries. This was a sign of things to come. I had heard about the long lines at EU border checkpoints for months, ever since the new EU Entry/Exit System was introduced. As I exited the plane quickly on account of being in Business Class, I would have been ahead of many passengers from my flight. I passed by the automatic kiosks set up for registration for EES, but saw that all of them - somewhere about 16, I would guess - were "out of order". So we would do the biometric registration manually, then... Thanks to the delay on the tarmac in Doha, we landed close to 3 p.m. on a Friday afternoon. Add to this that we were in the oldest terminal, with passengers flying mostly on Middle Eastern airlines, you can see that once you strip out the EU nationals and ones carrying passports from 4 special countries - U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Japan - who would have easy entry, I was surrounded by mostly brown people. It's Friday afternoon, the French immigration officers couldn't really care less about what happens to us, and I found myself standing in line with at least 150 people in front of me, and only 3 immigration counters open. Those three counters subsequently became divided into two separate queues, with two counters serving families with children, and the rest of us - I'm guessing 100 people in front of me - waiting in line for ONE officer. As the afternoon went on, three working counters became two, and just before it was my turn to get processed, the single counter processing people without kids went dark. ONE counter left. By the time I cleared immigration, I had stood in line for TWO HOURS. My luggage had been waiting to be collected for a long, long time... I had originally thought 4½ hours would be sufficient for me to clear immigration, get to my hotel for check-in, then walk to dinner. Now I wasn't sure. I grabbed a taxi and hoped for the best, but it was close to 5:30 p.m. on a Friday afternoon when I left the airport. Traffic. The quickest way, apparently, was to loop over to the west side and come in through Porte Maillot, pass the Arc de Triomphe, cross the Pont de l'Alma to the left bank, and eventually arrive at Hotel Mercure Paris Gare Montparnasse TGV. Check-in was quick, and I called the restaurant from my room to tell them - in my very broken French - that I was gonna be about 30 minutes late for my booking. I quickly changed out of the clothes I had been wearing, then walked as quickly as I could to my destination over 1 km away. I know I looked very flustered when I arrived at Joséphine Chez Dumonet, but the staff recognized me instantly and led me to my table. How many single Asian diners were they expecting? Anyway, it was obvious that the majority of their patrons were tourists...
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