Nous Sommes Arrivees

After what was quite possibly the worst flight ever, we are finally in Nice.  It is warm, it is humid, it is green, it is not Afghanistan.  We took the Ariana flight direct from Kabul to Frankfurt in order to avoid Dubai's inane airport flight schedule.  Almost every flight there seems to either land or leave in the very early morning or after midnight, and the whole idea seems to be to force you to stay at least one day in Dubai.  This flight was long, 7+ hours, but it gets you direct into Frankfurt, where you can make any connection at all.  But for starters, some of the people in our group chose not to show up for the shuttle to the airport, so we lost nearly half an hour waiting for them.  Next, there was some security issue as you approached the airport, so they wouldn't let the Embassy cars drop us off.  Instead, we got dumped in some parking lot far from the airport, and there we had to get on an Afghan bus that took us to the airport terminal itself.  By then it was only an hour before our flight was going to depart, and the lines were interminable.  Kabul isn't exactly a highly automated airport.  So we got our boarding passes about ten minutes before takeoff, and we still had to go through the passport line.  That took about half an hour.  Luckily, the flight was delayed an hour and a half - except that we were sitting on the tarmac during that time, in a packed plane with no ventilation at all, filled with more screaming kids than I have seen the entire year here.  It was like 200 Afghan families had packed up the entire clan and were ready to emigrate.  One father put a plastic bag over his kid's head to get him to be quiet; I don't believe I ever tried that with ours, but it's never too late to learn new techniques.  So we got into Frankfurt nearly two hours late, and time was short.  We stood in yet another passport line behind several hundred Japanese in a tour group, but then finally, finally, we were in Europe.  The machine to print out your boarding pass worked, easily and instantly.  The airport was clean and quiet.  The Lufthansa flight to Nice boarded and left and arrived on time.  And as we walked into the airport, the signs said, Welcome to the French Riviera.  So now, it's time to explore.