Flight ZUR to CGD (Paris)
After a short stop over in Zurich we flew into Paris – Charles de Gaulle Airport (CGD).
The flight was relatively short and straightforward, and once again the SWISS International Airlines were very good about getting us here smoothly and in comfort. This is the last of the long haul legs to kick off our holiday. As a pleasant bonus all of our checked-in luggage made it here in one piece. and undamaged and on the same flight as us.
Arrival and Day 1
Having landed at Charles De Gaulle it took us about 40 minutes by taxi to make way to our hotel.
The Hotel
Arc de Triumphe – from ave. Foch
The hotel we are staying at is the Hotel Le Meridien Etolie, located on Boulevard Gouvion Saint-Cyr in 17th arrondissement ( abbreviated to Arrt on street signs, and noting that the 20 arrondissements make up the official administrative limits of “Ville De Paris”) . This hotel is not really our style. Its huge and very much a hotel type hotel, rather than apartment style hotel, but it is the same hotel where the Paris to Vienna river cruise starts, so for simplicity of logistics we chose to stay here rather than re-pack and shift hotels.
Also the hotel is close to some of the landmarks.
Sorting out data/internet access.
This has been much harder than in needs to be.
An observation about the European mobile telephone system: It is fragmented across multiple carriers (a good thing for competition) and across many countries. In practice this means that the same parent carrier company is operating as several different companies and therefore different carriers in different countries (bad for clean and cheap portability). In practice this means that a data only SIM with say… Orange France, does not work as local data SIM with Orange Germany, and is treated as a roaming data SIM instead. Upshot of this is that its hard to find a single data SIM that will work across all the countries we are likely to visit, without chewing up your pre-paid credit (or your budget)
The hotel has wired internet and we have a WiFi router/AP kit with us, so that’s not a problem for now… we will find out soon what the cruise ship has to offer on the WiFi end. We might have to procure a bunch of different SIMs after all.
Some food and sleep
Having gone into this long holiday with a 37 hour long-haul flight. Its now time to crash and get some sleep.
