Prime Meridian

After getting home at midnight from my very delayed Belize turn, I woke up the next morning to find that I had been assigned a London trip that evening.  I was happy of course, since it is my favorite layover city, but a bit nervous because I was assigned position 5 on the 767 which is the Business Class Galley position.  I'd never flown that position on a long haul flight.

The purser and crew were awesome though and they helped me thru it.  It was actually easier than I thought.  I guess I had built it up in my mind as something very hard, but as long as you stay organized and a step ahead of the next meal course, it's not so bad.

This was "late late" London, our third nightly departure, so we don't arrive until after noon the following day.  We decided rather than sleep, we would just hit the ground running.  It was a beautiful day in the city and it would have been a shame to sleep it away.

My friend Adriana was on the trip and so a group of us decided we were going to head down to Westminster and hope a boat up the Thames to Greenwich.  It takes about an hour and you see plenty of landmarks as your make your way out of London.  We passed St. Paul's cathedral as well as an Egyptian Obelisk called Cleopatra's Eye.  According to the tour guide, the monument was a gift from the people of Egypt, but when I was in Egypt, it was implied that the Brits stole it, so you be the judge.

We arrived at Greenwich and made our way towards the Royal Observatory so we could see where the Prime Meridian runs thru the site.  It is the line that divides the Western and Eastern Hemisphere, and the Observatory also keeps Greenwich Mean Time, which is the standard in official time and also the point in which other time zones keep their time in relation.  Kind of a big deal.

Given that it was such a beautiful day, the park was bustling with people.  I made sure to get a foot shot for my album and visited the gift shop for some postcards.  After spending a some time at the top of the Observatory, we made our way back to a local pub for some refreshments.  I had a strawberry flavored beer that was quite tasty.  It was a mild day, so I found it to be sweet and refreshing.  Just what I needed.

We then made our way out of Greenwich.  The group found a little French restaurant they wanted to check out, but I broke away from then because I had errands to run in the city before shops started to close.  After taking the train and then the tube to Picadilly, I visited a bookstore to get the new Steig Larson book for my friend Becky and the new Michael Bolton CD for my mother (I made a point of telling the sales clerk it was for her, not me).

It was still light out so I walked around a bit and headed down to Covent Garden to watch the street performers and have a slice of pizza before making my way back to the hotel.  I think staying up was the key that day because I slept very soundly and when I woke up the next morning, I was very refreshed.

Standby Surprise

The worst part about reserve is the standby assignments.  Once, twice, sometimes three times a month, you get the exclusive invite to come to the airport and sit for 6 hours at a time to be ready to go somewhere at the last minute.  This month I have done two standby's and counting.  Last week I was about 45 minutes from the end of my assignment when I was called to be part of the crew of a very delayed turnaround to Belize City.  The original crew had gone illegal so I was going to be paired with a reassigned JFK crew to work the turn.  The crappy part of the whole deal was that the trip was scheduled to leave 5 minutes before my assignment ended.  The nice surprise in the whole deal was that I got to fly with my friend Roz.  We were in the same initial training class 12 years ago.  The last two months I've managed to catch up with a bunch of people I hadn't seen in years.

We were full going down and had some rowdy guys going to a bachelor party, but coming home it was light and everyone slept since we were about 4 hours late arriving.

Making the most of it....

The second week of the month I was given a Paris trip on reserve.  What made it especially cool was that I would be covering a trip out of Boston to Paris and my friend Anne was part of the Boston based crew working the flight.  Anne and I have been friends since we were new hires back in Boston in the early days of our flying careers.  Thru the power of Facebook, we'd reconnected, but I had not seen her in years.  Three of us were deadheading to Boston cover the flight since it upgraded to a 767 from a 757.


The deadhead up to Boston was full and I had a middle seat in the back of a packed 757.  I sat next to a nice guy from Austin named Weldon who was also on his way to Paris to do a couple of concerts at Disneyland Paris.  He was a nice guy and he even gave me a CD of his music.  You can check out his website at http://www.weldonhenson.com.


Because the flight was upgraded to a larger plane, we had lots of open seats since the booking levels remained the same.  The flight to Paris is much shorter out of Boston, just under 7 hours, so we don't get crew rest or anything, which is kind of lame, but it is what it is.

Anne and I enjoyed catching up and I was excited because we would get to hang out in Paris together, BUT, the four of us who were added to the crew with the equipment upgrade were all scheduled to layover at a hotel at the airport and not in town!  Nothing could be more miserable than spending 27 hours in an airport hotel with nothing to do.

Soooooo, when you are handed lemons, you make lemonade.  Two of my co-workers, Ed and Juanita, and I decided to take the RER train into Paris and get out and see some of the city.  We all met up in the hotel lobby that afternoon after our naps and headed into town.  The good news is that there is direct train service from the airport to the center of town, so while it takes a while, it's relatively easy to get there.

The train made about million stops and with each one, got more and more crowded.  Of course there was a lady with a stroller the size of a small car who tried to get on an otherwise packed train!  We exited around Notre Dame cathedral.  I decided a foot shot would be a great addition to my "Around the World with my Feet" album.  The bad news was that it was raining and everything was dirty and damp, but Ed let me borrow his USA today so my butt didn't get moist.

I also stumbled upon the "Center of the Universe" which is the kilometre zero in Paris.  Not sure what it means to the planet, but everyone gets their pictures taken on it and people throw money around it and the gypsies collect it.

After leaving Notre Dame, we made our way over the Seine to the Hotel de Ville, the famous building that used to serve as the City Hall of Paris.  It's the site of the famous photograph of the kissing couple taken around 1950.

Given the weather, it was not super busy here so I grabbed my own photo.  Not much has changed, although now there is a modern fountain to the left of the building.  As we were walking around the neighborhood, we saw a man get hit by a cyclist, which was a little upsetting.  The cyclist didn't seem to care, and since I don't speak french, I tried to give the "ok" symbol to the poor pedestrian, who responded with a "oui" so I am guessing he was ok, and he did get up and walk away.  I think he might have broken his iPod though.

After buying some french moutard (mustard) at a little bodega, we stumbled upon a little pedestrian side street and a neat little pizzeria called Tresor.  We enjoyed a nice bottle of red wine and some great food.

We made our way back to the train station and began the long train ride back to Roissy.  At this point, it's close to 11pm, so we are getting sleepy.  The hotel is supposed to run a van to the train station every 15 minutes, but after 45 minutes, and still no van, we found a kind security guard who let us use his cell to call the hotel and get a van sent our way.


I finally put my head on my pillow around midnight.  I was a little miffed when I woke up a mere two hours later and was WIDE awake.  I never did go back to sleep and there was not much in the way of non-French television.


We were scheduled to deadhead home to base and the flight was not full in coach.  Jane, our third co-worker got an upgrade, but Juanita and I were stuck in the back.  We had a row to ourselves, but there was a bratty little kid behind us who kicked our seats for the entire 10 hour flight home.  I was so tired that after lunch, I even managed to sleep a few hours while the little spawn of the devil continued to terrorize everyone around her.