Arrival Day – Paris

The flight journey was good overall in terms of timings and inflight services. I met Mani at the Heathrow Airport and we had a 2.5 hour break to board the flight to Paris. The flight to Paris was delayed by 45 minutes due to some flight maintenance work. We arrived at the Orly Airport in Paris around 6.30 PM on Aug 12th. A total surprise had been waiting for us at the Airport. As part of my planning, I had booked the shuttle service via Expedia from Orly airport to our hotel in Paris. I had called and confirmed the reservation before our departure. When I called the shuttle service after arriving at Orly, they told me the shuttle was waiting at the CDG Airport (Paris International airport). The shuttle guy asked us to take a taxi as they had no person available immediately to pick from Orly Airport.

We had planned to exchange dollars to Euro in Paris and unfortunately the Orly airport had the Money exchange closed that day. We managed to find an ATM nearby and able to cash out some Euros. With all this sorted out, our next one was to find a taxi by ourselves. Neither of us know French 🙂 we wrote down all of the hotel address information and gave to the taxi guy. The taxi had the GPS and the driver could pick up the english language by specific keywords and dropped us at the Hotel. I initially planned to go on a night tour on our own inside the city. Since we were so tired and hungry, we dropped the plan and went on a walk searching for restaurants. It was a pleasant surprise that most of the shops close before 7 PM. We were lucky to find a Pizza Hut and finished the night with a Veggie Pizza – I didn’t realize that Pizza & Pasta are going to be my main food for the next 3 days and yes indeed that’s how it went :-).

In France u’ll find a Pizza and Pastry shop almost every 3 shops in a row.