A travel day, which means I normally have very little to say about it. Fabiola picked me up early at my house, drove me to Modesto, and from there I took the bus to Pleasanton (1 hour travel), hopped into the BART metro (1.5 hours), and arrived at San Francisco Airport by 12:30 pm, with plenty of time for my 4 pm departure to Lisbon. I already mentioned that my flight from Lisbon to Paris had been cancelled and TAP Portugal had rescheduled me for another flight a couple of days from now. They thus insisted on booking my luggage all the way to Paris, even though I told them I had made other arrangements and needed to pick my small suitcase in Lisbon. “Don’t worry, it will be at the carousel in Lisbon for you to pick up.” Ha!
I was lucky and was put in the first seat of the Economy
class, so I had plenty of leg room and the 11 hours flight was better than
most. I landed in Lisbon at 11:30 am, and of course my luggage was nowhere to
be seen. So I had to go to the luggage office, where they assured me the
suitcase would go direct to Paris Orly. Long explanations followed and finally
someone was sent to fetch my suitcase. A bit miffed I headed to the TAP
Portugal office, to put a formal request for compensation on the extra money I
had to shell to buy a separate ticket for Air France to take me to Paris Charles
De Gaulle. It was all very polite and the young woman at the counter told me
that they had to cancel the flight because of a strike of air controllers at
Paris Orly, an on such cases the airline had no responsibility. Still, she gave
an email address to lodge my request for compensation, which I did sitting at
the Burger King at the airport, hoping that TAP will come up with some sort of
offer to assuage my hostile feelings against them. Time will tell.
Air France was pretty crowded, and the flight took off with
nearly an hour delay, but I finally landed in CDG, where my dear friend
Géraldine and her two sons, Theo and Lucas, came to pick me up. I was so glad
to see them 😊
I met Géraldine in Germany in 1988 and over the last 20 years we have kept in punctuated
friendly contact. I have seen the boys grow into two strapping young men. Theo is
one year away from completing his studies in Computer Science in the north of
France, and is now in a 7-week experiential stint in Paris working with a metal
recycling company. He thought he was going to concentrate in cybersecurity, but
like most computer scientists he is now up to his neck in AI. Lucas just
finished high school and wants to pursue Business Administration and Economics. He is getting ready to follow a 2-year
pre-MBA course of study, and then apply to the Harvard-version of an MBA school
here in France.
Géraldine, one the of the loveliest people I know, is an
Investment Management specialist at one of the big firms in the city, and is
now tackling a new specialty in using AI to analyze financial performance data
and prepare 200-page financial reports for some of her big, big clients. Fairly
complex tasks, but once she figures out how to do it will be a major help in
her work.
On the long drive home (she lives in Triel sur Seine, west
of Paris) we talked about the strike that derailed my flight to Orly, and other
signs of social discontent in France. Of course, with the Olympic Games taking
place here between July 26 to August 11, the government has decreed that any
strike during that period will be considered illegal, in my eyes an even
greater encouragement for disgruntled workers to call in sick over that period.
My flight back to San Francisco is on August 17, from Orly, so I am going to go
back at the same time that a lot of tourists are trying to get out of Paris. I
don’t think I planned this part of the trip all that well.
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