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-   -   The World's Worst Airport Terminal - CDG 1 (https://www.fodors.com/community/europe/the-worlds-worst-airport-terminal-cdg-1-a-732683/)

PalenqueBob Aug 29th, 2007 11:53 AM

It seems Customs at terminal 1 though were a snap everytime i've been thru - just walk past a couple of bored looking Customs guys.

I wish i had a camera and could have taken a picture of one Duanier (sp?) Customs guy who was puffing away on a cigarette whilst standing right in front of a huge no-smoking pictogram

But of course in France it seems you can get arrested for taking pictures of cops, etc. At least that's what one female cop in Paris told me when i tried to snap her picture in her designer-type outfit.

kerouac Aug 29th, 2007 12:00 PM

Italiangirl, CDG-3 is not meant to be any good -- it is the low cost terminal. In fact, the prefab building was bought at some trade fair and was never even built to be an airport structure.

flanneruk Aug 29th, 2007 12:30 PM

I don't use T1 these days, but it used to dominate my life.

Back then, if the queues at Immigration (there are never queues at Customs: what is Italiangirl going on about?) were lengthy, the circular system meant you could go round the circle till you found a shorter queue. And even if the time you saved was longer than the walk took, you at least felt you'd had some control over things. Is this no longer possible?

Then, as I imagine now, you could also derive some satisfaction from the schoolboy science-fiction feel of the whole place and the realisation that this really was a bloody silly, and bloody ugly, way of designing an airport. Only the French could have combined dysfunction with hideousness so remorselessly, and still preened themselves they'd built a Grand Projet.

And only a race as insular as the French could fail to realise that at La Guardia's Marine Terminal, and at Bucharest Baneasa, people had designed similar airports, more efficiently, more beautifully, - and decades earlier.

Sharisue Aug 29th, 2007 12:48 PM

It's got to be Philadelphia!
I had a flight from Philly to Chicago last Thursday. We sat on the plane for 3 hours w/0 AC. Then we were told that the flight was cancelled. I was put on stand-by for a later flight, but it was full. Had to pay $250 for hotel room (out of my own pocket) for the night.
I finally got out at 3 the next day and arrived in Chicago at 10 pm!


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