Air France airplane food
I’ve been reading travel blogs and about the tales of travel hackers. There’s a lot of folks out there that travel for business, and then take those miles and use them for pretty awesome vacations. They used to get airline miles by tricking the U.S. Mint into an ultimately poor business transaction, but basically you see lots of people who use miles to fly business or first class for long haul flights. For the rest of us minions, we fly coach, because honestly, who the fuck has money for business class. So let’s talk about flying coach for a minute. In the U.S., they rename it to ‘Economy’ class because it sounds nicer. It’s coach though. For this trip, Steph and I flew Air France non-stop from NY to Paris, because why spend so much time in airports when you can fly non-stop? Well travel hackers do it differently because they get more miles by adding a leg to their trip, and most of them have lounge access so they relax with free alcohol and wifi. Again, normal people like to fly non-stop to get it over with. So let’s look at what kinda food you get in coach class.
One nice thing about Air France is that they give you alcohol for free. Yes, you read that right, FREE ALCOHOL. In that first picture, what you see is some Dewar’s and some brandy. Double fisting baby, it makes your coach flight all the more bearable. I didn’t even drink as much as some other folks. There’s wine too on Air France flights. Red or white, and basically for as long as you want it during dinner. The meal itself was way under seasoned. It needed a lot of salt and I was glad to find that the little salt packets greatly enhance the meal from “chicken” to chicken. The highlight of the dinner was actually a cold bean salad that I finished way too fast, hence no pictures of it. The dessert was either a dry cake/brownie, or some rice pudding, both would inspire tears.
After dinner they force you to close the shutter to the window because when you take a NY to Paris flight departing at night, you arrive in the morning. So they try to get you to sleep but the sleep is only for a few hours because they serve breakfast about an hour and a half before landing. While the alcohol made the coach meal tolerable, there was nothing to rescue the breakfast.
Breakfast comes in three parts: yogurt, muffin, and orange juice. They also offer coffee, but that is standard practice I think. The yogurt was inoffensive and generally edible. Flavor was lacking, and it’s definitely not Greek yogurt. For airplane food, this was aight. The muffin though… I dunno, it was not good. After two bites, I gave up and just settled on the minute maid orange juice. Surprisingly refreshing on a long flight.
Soon after they cleared our meal, the plane began it’s decent towards CDG airport. They flight right over Paris and you a nice aerial view of the generally flat, but very memorable city. It’s not like flying over NYC with the tall buildings, but with mostly short buildings, you can make out the details pretty easily. You can see the two little islands in the river and the gardens that are scattered through the city. After landing, there’s another three hour train ride, and then vacation starts!
Posted by Danny on September 9, 2011 at 10:07 am
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