Talbert Pipes Life in France Adventures The Cats have Landed The exhausted cats collapse on the couch The Cats have Landed (Notes - This text is from an email I wrote for our parents, who were anxious for news of whether the cats had arrived safely or not. They were driven by Emily's parents to Dulles Airport in Washington and put on a direct Air France flight as cargo, to land at Charles DeGaulle in Paris where we would TGV in to pick them up. It was not so simple. A couple of bits of explanation - one oft-repeated comment in the story is about "ribbons and stamps". This has become an inside joke with us about the sheer ridiculousness of the French paperwork system. Bureacracy in France is insanely complex. Everyone has a desk and you must make an appointment with them, then go there in person... no email or faxing of info here... and find out which papers you are missing. Eventually, if you are able to assemble all of your papers, you will return happily to find out that they all need stamps. France runs on stamps and official ribbons affixed to official documents... documents that the end person you must deal with almost universally ignores. This was best summed up in the terrific and hilarious little short story called "Doucement, Doucement!" by Donald Moffat. This adventure of ours is also almost minor compared to some of the obstructions we've run into during the move and since - this was over in only 1 day and our lives did not hang in the balance) We got up at 6:30am for breakfast before driving to St. Nazaire to catch our morning TGV train to DeGaulle. We got to the station OK and found parking, and even found our TGV. The morning TGV ride was typical - monotonous and soothing, and I soon fell asleep in my seat though Emily sat in a ball of nervous tension the whole trip. We arrived at the DeGaulle TGV station around 11-ish. Our return reservation wasn't until 3:30 in the afternoon so we figured we had plenty of time. It's worth noting that the DeGaulle TGV station is not the one we have previously used. On the original advice of travelers and a couple of travel books about Paris, we had avoided the DeGaulle station and instead gone into Paris to the Montparnasse station, which requires cabbing into the city. The books described the DeGaulle station as a madhouse and a haven for organized gangs of pickpockets and luggage thieves who waited there to prey on jet-lagged travelers arriving by plane. The DeGaulle TGV station is a part of the airport itself, and is built under the airport terminal so it's the obvious choice to use, and I'd always wondered previously about the wisdom of going out to the Montparnasse station when the DeGaulle one is right there under your feet. Well, it turned out that the DeGaulle station was really nice- very open and airy and not crowded at all, and no signs of bad guys or running luggage. In fact, it was much nicer and safer than the Montparnasse station in the city, where there were more panhandlers and such. SO - we arrived at this new (to us) TGV station around 11-ish. We walked up into the airport madhouse proper, and wandered until we found an Air France info desk. I noticed a couple of things along the way - there is a lot more English at the airport now, and even on the TGV they made secondary announcements in English, which was totally new. Everything has been in French on all our previous trips. Emily thinks it's for the holiday season - all the English coming down here in August. Anyway, the smiling info desk lady tells us to go into the airport to baggage claims and they will help us, and she gives us a special pass to get us back into the airport area past the waiting part. No one even looks twice at us nor asks for our pass as we boldly walk back through one-way doors into the very nerve-center of airport departures, demonstrating the amazing security in place. We find Air France baggage claims and there is a huge line, and the room is stiflingly hot. It's the place everyone comes to with luggage problems or to pick up special luggage. Several dogs are delivered to owners while we wait hopefully. We finally get a lady and explain our situation. She asks for our claim papers and is dismayed that we do not have any. This prompts much phone calling. She cannot find the cats and no one knows anything about them. Finally, after much broken French and English, she realizes that we did not fly with the cats ourselves; that they were shipped alone as freight (we had already stated this several times). She asks for a freight receipt ticket. We explain (again) that we have no such thing, but who would want to steal incoming cats, or even know they were coming? More phone calls. Finally she accepts our story and tells us that the cats are being held at "Fret 4", the freight/cargo warehouse where animals are kept. She gives us a paper, unfortunately without stamps or ribbons, saying "Fret 4 - Animalerie" and tells us to get a cab there as the Fret buildings are a totally different part of the airport and are miles away across the highway. We go back outside, our objective clear. We find a waiting cab and tell him we want the Fret 4 building. He smiles and is regretful, telling us he does not take fares to buildings so close, but that we should not take a cab for this anyway as the airport shuttle bus goes there for free. This conflicts our previous info so we return to the Air France info desk to ask if indeed the shuttle bus goes to Fret 4. Different info desk operator is also nice and gives us another paper telling us to go to Gate 9 in terminal A and catch the bus that stops there, and it will take us to the Fret building compound. We got to gate 9 and a bus pulls up. It is for downtown Paris. Fearing a mistake, we go back inside and find another info desk in this new terminal. To my amusement, the guy in line ahead of us is in jeans and jean jacket, and concludes his brief question to the lady with a very Southern, "Thankyuhmuch, mayam". We ask about the bus to Fret 4. There is no bus to Fret 4. But the other info guy gave us this paper saying gate 9 was a bus to Fret 4. No, the gate for the bus to Fret 4 is Gate 10. Wait... there IS a bus to fret 4? It turns out that there is not - BUT we can catch the bus at gate 10 to Roissypole, which is the bus clearing center at the other end of the airport. From there we must switch buses to an inner-airport employee bus (line 350) which will run us right to Fret 4. Armed with this information and a new piece of paper, we find gate 10 and are stunned out of our minds that the bus that pulls up says Roissypole. We hop the bus and ride the circumference of the airport and end up at Roissypole, where all the buses come to roost. There is a dizzying bus schedule showing the two hundred varying lines that run out of this place. We find that bus 350 goes to Fret 4...we think. We got to the bus 350 station and the bus is there. We get on and ask if this bus goes to Fret 4. No, it does not. You want line 349. He points ahead in the bus parking area to another marked (empty) bus space. We exit and go to the other space to wait. It is now 2pm and there is no way we will get back in time for our return train. We have had no lunch. We lunch on snickers bars, cookies, and water from portable bottles as we wait for our bus (349). After 25 minutes, a bus pulls up with a sign saying "Fret" on it. We get on. It is the same busdriver that we talked to earlier. He has swapped lines. This is the bus for Fret 4? Yes. He is THE French negative stereotype - totally unhelpful, volunteering no information, rude, sullen, sulky (or maybe that's the busdriver stereotype in general...). We ride for a bit. There are no announcements of what each stop is, and no way to know exactly what the Fret building will look like. Emily goes to ask and is told we must pay $2 for tickets since we are not airport employees. All the driver will volunteer is that "we have not reached the Fret stops yet" We wait. We see a huge sign saying "FRET". The bus stops and we ask if this is Fret 4. No, that is not yet. We ride further into the Fret compound. We see a sign saying Fret 1 and decide to hop out, as the driver is not communicating and we are afraid we will miss the area completely with no announcements. Besides, Fret 4 must be near Fret 1, non? We trust our feet more than the busdriver. We walk to Fret 1 and find the info office. Cats? What cats? There are no cats here. We need the imports office, around the building. We walk around the corner to the imports office for Fret 1 with sinking hearts. The imports office is crammed with people waiting in limbo for one elderly lady to handle their problems. We have much counsel amongst ourselves. We have the options of waiting here, where we will undoubtedly be told that this is Fret 1 and we need the imports office at Fret 4, so we have waited in vain, or we can use our feet and find Fret 4. We choose door number 2 and head out across the parking lot. We find a bus map that shows the fret building layout and find that Fret 4 is about 30 miles away (I exaggerate, but it was quite a walk). We take to the sidewalk, memorizing the street maze in our heads and begin to wend our way on foot to the fabled Fret 4. At this point we are both starved, totally frazzled, Emily is on the verge of tears from worrying about the terrified cats sitting in a huge warehouse somewhere forever, and I am expecting to encounter the skeletal remains of previous searchers along the sidewalk clutching hand-drawn maps of "Fret 4" covered in stamps and ribbons. We walk some distance and our path, which should have taken us to Fret 4 according to the bus map, takes us down a road into a warehouse maze where we are stopped dead by a giant fence and gate keeping people out. We turn back and head into the nearest open warehouse/office door we see to attack the first person we find, cook their flesh for lunch and take all their papers and ribbons. We find a little help desk with 3 cheerful young people who immediately respond worriedly to the two red-faced, sweating, starving Americans and begin calling around to the people they know who work in the warehouses. Eventually, the young guy finds a friend who has the cats and knows all about them. The cats are in Fret 1...where we were to start with. Yes, Fret 4 is the animalerie, but animals do not go there if they are from outside the EU. Instead, they go to fret 1 to the imports department. We sigh. He gives us another paper AND a number, our first real number of this adventure. We marvel at having a number and depart, retracing our route on foot through the maze. It's around 4pm now. We arrive back at Fret 1 to the same info office where we were before. The elderly lady is gone and so is the crowd - instead there is a 50-ish man there who is sharp as a tack and quite funny. He knows all about the cats. EVERYONE from this point on knows all about the cats. He needs our number. We supply the sacred number plus our passports and some spare ribbons we brought along for good measure. He is impressed, and stamps other papers for us and gives us a large stack of paper festooned with official stamps. We clutch this greedily and are directed to go to the Customs office where we must present these papers to the Customs official to get the cats. But wait, who are we just talking to? Never mind...we head out again. Where is the Customs office? Right down the building. There is no office. We wander outside for a bit looking hopelessly for the office and clutching our papers to our bodies. We go back in and walk directly into the warehouse. A young guard stops us and says we can't go inside. He looks over our papers, recognizes "the American cats", and points us to one small door *inside* the warehouse - unmarked - which goes to the Customs office. He even takes us there. We are met by another desk guy who knows about the cats and takes our papers, handling them like gold. He is impressed by our stamps and the sheer weight of the folder, and stamps some things himself then gives the whole mess back to us. We are to take these claim forms to the warehouse Customs desk and present them there. We wander back into the warehouse, wondering if it would be simpler to just tackle the guard while Emily dashes into the warehouse and tracks the howling to the right boxes. We find the warehouse office and go in to wait in another line until we are met by a smiling Frenchman who says "Meow". He glances at our paper mountain, tears a receipt off something, has us sign a card, doesn't even ask for the quarantine papers nor look through any of the paper stack, and vanishes...coming back with the two carriers. The cats! Freya is crying plaintively and immediately starts purring and rubbing her head against our fingers. There is no visible sign of Loki - she has dug her way under the foam padding and blanket in the bottom so all we can see is a rumpled mound of padding that occasionally shifts. We take the cats out and ponder how to get back to the airport. We are miles away and there is no reliable bus, and we have two cat carriers now. We find a bus stop and wait. Voila, a bus appears, and it is even the one we want - it takes us back to Roissypole and the driver is quite helpful. We do not offer to pay for a ticket and he does not ask. At Roissypole we step off the bus just as our main airport shuttle bus is pulling up with a big flashing sign saying "DeGaulle TGV Station". We jump on board and everyone peers curiously at the cats while we ride back across the maze of highways to the airport station. We arrive back at the TGV station at around 5pm and Emily goes to wrangle with the ticket clerk for new return tickets while I wait in the main area guarding the cat carriers and staring with undisguised lust at the McDonald's sign in the middle (In the US, McDonald's was my absolute LEAST favorite fast-food joint, but at times like these the lure of reliable familiar food, no matter how wretched, is strong). Em comes out with good news - they were very nice and we have replacement tickets, no charge, and the train leaves at 6:25 so we have time to eat. I guard the cats while Em goes to the McD's for hamburgers, which are manna from heaven at this point... our first meal since breakfast at 6am. We munch and peoplewatch for over an hour, until it's time. They post the train arrival berths on a big board and ours is Berth 4, train 5231. We go there and the sign says Berth 4, train 5091 to "somewhere else". Em wriggles her butt down onto the carriers to perch while I take off at a sprint to find our train. After a hard run down the line, I find the *other* Berth 4....Berth 4 NORTH, which was not specified on the arrivals sign. The train arrives as I get there. TGV trains do not stay in one place so I turn and run full-out back down the line to Emily, who has already figured this out and is running toward me with 2 cat carriers in hand. She tries to pass Loki to me at full gallop and we fumble, so I fall on the concrete again and get 2 more banged-up knees from a TGV experience but Loki's carrier is fine. I recover fast and we sprint again, diving into the open door just as the thing is preparing to pull away. We find our seats and collapse. We are entertained for the next 3.5 hours by talking to a Georgian family (Georgia as in the former USSR province in eastern Europe, not Atlanta) who speak Georgian, English, and French and whose daughter is totally fascinated by the cats. Their young boy is entranced by playing with his Buzz Lightyear and Woody toys, but the young girl keeps creeping in awe over to peer into Loki's carrier and tell us what a big cat she is. They are fun company all the way back. We also meet an Australian girl who's in France for 1 year's transfer student program, who asks us all about the move, the business, etc. Finally we arrive at St. Nazaire in pouring rain, and hike back out to our car with wet cat carriers for the long drive home. We arrive home at 11:30pm and open both doors, from which the cats explode as if on springs. Following are 2 hours of nosing and creeping and sniffing of everything while we have supper, after which we retire to the couch for a little wine, TV, and Emily, for the first time in months, has cats in her lap again. All is well with the world.