Hi there,
Today I am going to tell you how was the trip back to Porto.
As you have seen in previous articles, we had to cancel the home exchange we had planned for 3 months, and we only spent one month in Sydney.
The week before leaving for Sydney I was anxious because of the fear of such a long trip and at the same time it was a time when we were doing very well in Porto and really didn’t feel like leaving.
For the return, we were really looking forward to going back and as we were exhausted from sightseeing and the excessive heat of Sydney, I just wanted to get on the plane to rest.
While the flights from Amsterdam to Hong Kong and Hong Kong to Sydney were idyllic because there were only Asians and they were all sleeping, the flights back were not so pleasant.
We started with an 8-hour flight from Sydney to Singapore. On this flight there were lots and lots of children and almost all of them were crying, so I spent most of the flight with earplugs.
Still, since we were in the last row with no one behind us and a seat in the middle, we had room to stretch out and rest.
This flight went by quickly.
In Singapore we had a 4 hour wait that also flew by between brushing our teeth and doing our skincare.
I must point out that the toilets at the airport were impeccable and elegant.
The next flight was from Singapore to Paris and lasted 13h40.
Already at the boarding gate it reeked of cigarettes because almost everyone was French.
Having been in Sydney for a month without seeing any smokers, I was disgusted.
Here again we were in a row of 3 with the middle seat empty.
The bad thing is that there were 3 old English subnormal people in the back who pretty much ruined our trip.
As soon as we reclined our seats, they started banging on the seats and pushing as if they didn’t fit. Add to this the fact that every time they got up to go to the bathroom, they kept hanging onto our seats as if they had no leg strength.
Every time I would recline the seat back after eating, the lady in the middle would blurt out the phrase “Oh dear Jesus”.
It was our fault for not calling the stewardess from the very beginning.
We were able to rest and this flight of almost 14 hours also passed relatively quickly, but I would have killed those people.
At one point when I was lying down, the old man behind me pulled up my seat and I had to turn around and tell him not to even think of touching my seat again.
They were pulling the seats so hard that by the end of the flight, one of the seats was already damaged.
If you are old, obese and have no agility or flexibility to go economy class, pay to go business and if you can’t afford it, don’t travel.
This time the Air France meal was better than the Qantas meal.
We arrived at the Paris airport where we had the idea of paying for the VIP Lounge as we had an 8 hour wait until our next flight.
We had seen on the internet that there was a lounge with free access.
We first asked the price at the Air France VIP lounge and were told that they “did not have access for us”. We were shocked.
The lounge was almost completely empty, but they still didn’t want our money. I don’t know if it was racism or xenophobia.
We then decided to go in search of the lounge which was free, and it turned out that it was closed since the covid.
We asked at the Yotel how much it cost to take a shower and it was 20 euros per person. Even so, they didn’t know when they would have availability and there were more people complaining about when they would be able to access the showers.
We were put on a waiting list, but we still did everything in the bathroom (brushed our teeth, skincare and changed clothes.).
When they came to tell us that the showers were available, we were already clean, and it wasn’t worth it.
With all these, we had already spent more than half of the waiting time, so it wasn’t worth it either to enter a VIP Lounge, so we went to our boarding gate.
I would like to point out that the toilets at Paris airport were so dirty that it was inhuman. In Europe, the dirtiest airports are those of France and Spain.
So, we arrived in Porto after almost 2 days of traveling.
In the next post I will tell you how we found our house after a month of home exchange.