We'll always have Paris

I am sitting in at gate E59 at Charles de Gaulle in Paris waiting for my Air France flight to Tel Aviv.  I'm traveling to Israel to study Hebrew.  It's been 26 years since I've been in France.

First thing that strikes me about this airport is that the food is horrible.  Here we are in Paris and the only places to eat are crappy little 'cafeterias' at which you can buy tasteless sandwiches (mostly ham & cheese) and the ubiquitous croque monsieur, which in case you don't know is toasted ham & cheese.  Really can't even get a decent, European cup of coffee.  In this huge terminal there isn't an actual sit-down restaurant, brasserie, or cafe that serves a cooked-to-order meal.

When I first traveled to France, I was so excited to visit...the culinary capital of the Western World.  Fresh croissant, bouillabaisse, superb wine, the greatest chefs in the word and le croque monsieur?  What?  As in you're joking?  Now, we American's eat burgers, etc., but, then again, we don't claim to have pretensions of haute cuisine.  but, a toasted ham and cheese sandwich?  That's the French national dish?  Everywhere you go, le croque monsieur is there, as if the French name for a toasted ham and cheese sandwich makes it somehow more exotic than the 'ham & cheese.'  No matter what you call it, it's ham and cheese.  What a disappointment!

I'm also reminded that customer service is not a French specialty.   I finally went to a kiosk kind of thing and the woman working barely spoke a word to me during our 5 minute transaction.  When it took me literally a nano second to figure out how to work the machine that reads your debit card (a bit different than in the States, with all the directions in French), she reached across the counter, grabbed the card from my hand and ran it herself. 

The dollar ain't what it used to be. For about 14 euros--$20, I got a thimble full of coffee, a 1/2 of a cheese sandwich (though it was goat cheese plus a slice of tomato) and a very bad chocolate croissant (Albertson's is better).  

When you leave our little slice of heaven in Park City, the first thing you notice is that most of the world is not white.  That's obvious.  But here Terminal 2E of de Gaulle, you can't help but be struck by the huge number of people I take to be Muslims.  I draw this conclusion based on the number of women wearing some form of burkha, hijab or chadri.  At least in this terminal, which is an international terminal, I would say, conservatively, Muslims, are 30% of the people here.