Why we love to hate Heathrow

After an eleven hour red-eye seated next to a four-month old, you show up at the bastion of international air travel with a 1 hour connection. You walk about a kilometer before a security checkpoint instructs you to combine all of your hand luggage into one (for me that meant stuffing the Sally Williams nougat I brought to share with my fellow trainees in Paris), since "in the UK, we only carry one bag" - whatever. The next step is where you go through security where most everything has to come off, so they can measure to make sure your travel toiletries are <100 mils. At the other end, a monitor with your connecting gate number still eludes you, so you have to learn from the BA counter that it is in fact in Terminal 4, down the long escalator, onto the bus (since, you are of course in terminal 1.)

Three flights of stairs, a ten minute wait for the bus, a twenty minute bus ride, three flights of stairs up to the terminal, this time a three kilometer walk to gate 24, all the way alongside the non-operational people movers, and three more flights of stairs down, onto yet another bus for the final ten minute ride to the plane... the old lady next to me said it best: "next time I'll drive to Paris", after all it is only a one hour flight!

With that, I am in Paris at a health food store we also visited in January (granted the food is great, albeit very expensive, but I'll be honest the visits are more to do with the "wifi spot" sticker on the window). My pre-deployment training starts tomorrow morning. As of last week I was supposed to be the only one in training, but apparently now we are seven in total going to all sorts of exciting places like Pakistan, Sudan, Sri Lanka, and of course, Afghanistan. Must say, working for the NGO sector sure is different than the government. Time will tell how the two compare in effectiveness and results...I am also curious, and remain very excited about the position and the opportunity to work out in the field.

I will be in Paris most probably until Friday and arrive in Kabul sometime Saturday.