Northern Hemisphere 2006 - Part 1 - Charles de Gaulle airport

It's been quite a journey... My little brother proposed to a French girl called Arielle around a year ago, after meeting fortuitously in the Hunter Valley, an hour North of Sydney. Consequently I got to meet her soon after they got together, and feel a bit special having met the lovely couple probably before you!

Jem and Arielle lived in Adelaide for a while, working on vintage, in cellars, on marketing, but their feet were itchy to get over to France, which I have to say was a brave move by Jem. (Did someone tell him he'd have to learn a language?! Tee hee...) However he's lasted more than a year, and is quite the frog now, pulling out the proper and slang French words - e.g. mon pote - on sms communications. Hence I thought I should do some study before I went over, and if you are looking for a good series of French tutorial audio CD's I can heartily recommend Monsieur Michel Thomas. Il est vraiment mon pote.

The journey started with the inevitable confined pressurised space and long airport stops in KL and Amsterdam. I exhausted most of the decent movies and TV, taking in:
Match Point (Woody Allen latest)
All The President's Men (70's Watergate expose with Redford and Hoffman)
Family Guy, Extras, The Office (US), etc...

Surprisingly there were fairly scant security checks in mainland Europe, despite being warned by everyone before I left, France was extremely laissez faire! Coming out of the airport I was not even checked for anything. Oh well! Came out of the airport to quite a family greeting - you can see that one above.