Fun at Paris Charles De Gaulle airport

So I arrive at Paris CDG from Heathrow, disembark from the plane and enter the terminal. There is a sign saying "Baggages", so I follow that and come to an immigration desk. Immigration takes all of 20 seconds before I am in the baggage collection area.

Before me is baggage collection belts 1 and 2. The screen only shows flights from Prague, Bucharest and a couple more east european countries. Hmm. No London anywhere. There are these two people waiting for luggage, so I ask them, but they don't speak english. Where are the others from my flight anyway? I go over to what looks like a help desk and ask the person there. After some broken english, I am told that British Airways is at Baggage Belt 4, at the other end of the terminal. To get there, I need to exit this baggage area and go to the other end.

I leave, walk over to the other end and find Belt 4, but I can't find the enterance to it. The only enterance seems to be through the Immigration desk on the other side of the terminal, and I've already finished Immigration. I go to the Information Help Desk and the person there informs me that I should wait near the baggage exit. When someone comes out, the door will open and I should walk in when the door is open. Interesting!! I do that, and get in. Inside, a customs guy asks me why I am entering from here, and when I tell him (going to the wrong baggage area seems to be a common thing), he says that I should go to the British Airways desk where they will fill up a customs clearance form and I need to give that to the customs.

Back outside, I go to the British Airways desk, show my boarding pass and get the customs clearance form. This is so common that the person at the desk had lots of these forms on the top of the desk. I take the form and get back into the baggage area. The customs guy takes the form and I can finally get my baggage!!

Back from France trip

So I'm back from the France trip and after two weeks without Internet, I have access again... only to find out that my comp at home is not working (video card seems to have died), so it might be a while before I can upload photos. I have to upload photos of both the Germany and France trips, but it might take a while before I can get my comp up and running again.

Electricity plug points again

After thinking some more about my complaint on plug shapes, I realised that having incompatible plug shapes is actually a good thing. Different plug shapes prevent you from accidentally connecting a device meant for one voltage into a plug point which delivers another voltage. This is an example of the design principle 'Make it hard for users to do the wrong thing'.