Paris Airport.

Oh dear.

What a awful, nasty, boring, badly designed hub of international travel. The roads weave this way and that, the bus driver seems to have picked turns at random, dropping some off here and there and giving them confused sounding instructions as they departed. I jumped off at a large round building and proceeded to walk around looking for my gate. Nada. The gates change their signs a few times – the one that turned out to be Singapore Airlines was previous advertising some unheard of local Russian plane, and then an Arabic flight before the signs blinked and became the one I was waiting for. Checked in, I departed for the “lounge” which was up an escalator that felt soggy and past some makeshift plyboard walls. There was a CD shop, a tobacconist, a place that sold tourist crap and another that sold alcahol. There was also a coffee machine and a junk food dispenser. Yes, this is the international departure lounge. For all international flights.

I got my tax stamp (they didn't have a problem with it, once I'd gone back through customs looking for them – I've got two stamps for departing France on the same day, and no stamps for entering France in the first place) for the camera which turned out to be no hassle at all. After all that worrying (well, ten minutes worth).

The flight was, how you say, boring. I sat next to a lady who used be a Brit (returning to Adelaide). We got talking about the rubbishy quality of modern British Export Television, and talked about how The Bill used be so much better. Turns out she was a cop in the area they show was supposedly in and the TV people had it pretty much all correct for a while, showing it how it was (except that she said they never ever solved a crime in exactly half an hour!). Then I watched the third Harry Potter movie on the tiny screen in the headrest of the chair in front of me and fell asleep for most of the way to Singapore.

Singapore was different in the day. I could see the unforgivingly dense city stretching out into a white haze of smoke. I have no idea what it really looks like, having only ever seen it at night with a bay covered in the glowing lights of a million ships and vessels, and in the day as a white city shrouded in grey smog. I got off my flight, caught the travellator for about half a kilometer and checked myself back through a metal machine and hopped right on the next flight. There was no hour and a half of killing time, no queues and no waiting. Not bad, really.

Flying back over Australia was a long and fairly uninteresting journey. We came in over the Kimberly to avoid weather over the top end (according to the in-flight map), passed over the top of Uluru and across NSW to Sydney. Sydney airport is so much nicer than any other I've seen on this journey – even the mile long shopping mall-come entertainment centre that is Singapore has nothing on the efficiency and niceness of Sydney airport. Customs was a breeze as they told me not to worry about the camera and I had nothing else to declare. And out in the main lobby was Mum and Dad and Rachael (and Fudge) ready to drive me home.

And that was my holiday.

2005-02-01T22:08:00