Departure for Toulouse

As I sit here at Air France terminal 31 in Paris’s Charles de Gaule airport waiting for a connecting flight to Toulouse, I am inspired to start my first blog entry about this exciting ECI trip. Any time spent in an airport is a feast for the senses. At the moment I’m being treated to the beautiful sounds of the Italian language as passengers at a neighboring gate await a delayed flight to Rome. I don’t have to know too much Italian to understand that delays mean frustration in any language, although there is a pure charm in the gestures that accompany the verbal complaints. After our plane from Boston finished taxing on the runway about an hour ago, we all disembarked via mobile stairs and a bus shuttle that took us to the terminal. It reminded me of the first time I visited Paris in 1988. Walking among all the huge planes with the colorful flags of airlines from around the world reminds you that you are no longer in Kansas. Indeed, this is very, very far from Kansas. I am surrounded by passengers waiting to board flights to Geneva, Budapest, Oslo, and Rome. The kids in my small group from Boston seem so excited and surprisingly energetic at the moment. It’s amazing what a croissant, a deck of cards, and a French crossword puzzle will do to help them forget about their fatigue and cravings for a shower. The rest of the group from San Francisco should be arriving very soon and I’m looking forward to meeting the other students. If they are as nice as the ones that I accompanied from Boston, this is going to be a memorable trip.