Paris - Day One

I should actually start with day minus one - yesterday, November 28, when I got up at 4:30 local time, made sure I had all 500 pages of information I needed for the COP loaded on my iPad, and that I had all the things I needed packed, and that Bruce had enough food in the fridge to last for two weeks on more than just fried egg sandwiches and taco chips ... So I did all that, jumped on the UP train, got to Pearson in the promised 25 minutes and then sat for three hours in Terminal 3, waiting for my plane and reading the draft negotiation text from which will eventually emerge the new climate agreement among the world's nations.

Funny story about Terminal 3. If you've been there, you know the passenger waiting areas feature rows of white marble tables with iPads mounted at every seat so that you can read books, play games, browse the Internet, and, at least in theory, order food.

I needed to eat, so I ordered some Udon noodle vegetarian soup. The way it works is you select what you want from the menu on the iPad, pay for it at a little terminal also set up on the table and then wait a few minutes. Your order appears as if by magic.

Except mine didn't. I wasn't sure what was an appropriate amount of time, but when nothing came to my table in almost 45 minutes, I started poking around on the iPad. There was a "call for assistance" button, so I pressed that. Nothing happened. I had already paid for the nothing I was getting, so I pressed the button again. Still nothing. As there seemed to be no consequences to pushing the button, I pressed it over and over and over again.

Finally, a young woman approached me to ask if I had been the one pressing the assistance button. She seemed a little vexed. She explained to me that my iPad was sending a signal as if it were on another table. That's why I hadn't gotten my soup.

She brought me a bowl of Udon noodles - not very hot - and, as I was eating, a young man came along and fixed the iPad.

The flight to Paris left on time, was as uneventful as one likes these flights to be and got us into Charles DeGaulle Airport an hour ahead of schedule. Must have been tailwinds.

We - the Minister, three of his staff, the special advisor to the Premier on Climate Change and me - were spirited away from the airport by a hired driver who then took us to the COP site - minutes away
from the airport - so we could register and pick up a few goodies, like a free transit pass and a welcome kit that included a portable ashtray. I'm not kidding.

When we got to our hotel, it was still pretty early in the morning - 9 a.m. local time - so we got ourselves settled in, had some breakfast and then went for a walk with the Premier of Ontario to Sacre Coeur at the top of the hill in Montmartre.

From left to right: Security guy, security guy, the Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, the Premier of Ontario, the Minister's Chief of Staff

I hadn't slept much on the plane, and had more or less been awake for the past twenty hours, and really pushed my hip past its limit with the little jaunt. So I just hung around in my room for most of the afternoon, trying not to fall asleep.

That would have been a full day, but the new federal Minister of the Environment decided to throw a reception for the hundreds of Canadians in town for the COP. I hooked up with Ontario's new Environmental Commissioner, Dianne Saxe, walked through Paris at night, crossed the Seine and joined a giant, teeming, hollering band of very happy Canucks at the Canadian Cultural Centre on the rue de Constantine. My Premier was there, the Quebec Premier was there, Tom Mulcair and Elizabeth May were there and I had just missed both the Alberta Premier and the federal minister.

Just when Dianne and I were really starting to feel the jet lag, the booming, happy crowd thinned out. We grabbed the subway (first time on the Paris Metro for both of us) and rode back to Boulevard Hausmann. Assuming it would be hard to go wrong - but recalling the trouble Bruce and I had the last time, thirty years ago, I was in Paris - we assessed our options for a meal with a bit of care. We ended up eating at a nice little place, tres authentique, where I had duck confit.