Stranded for one day at CDG Airport , Paris

My trip from Detroit to Paris was nice, except for the fact that my inflight entertainment system was not working. But I was spending my time chatting with the fellow passenger - he seemed a nice person. He was from Nigeria, now working in Detroit as a physician , going to meet his parents in Nigeria. I had a good sleep and the flight reached Paris at around 8:40 am local time. My next flight was to Bangalore, from a different terminal and just 1 hour after .

So I went out from the plane, took the shuttle, and then reached for the other flight. As I was walking through the corridor, I reached out for my passport in my waist bag. My waist bag was not there !!!!!!!!

I was a bit nervous, as I kept the bag always with myself, and it had all the important stuff, like the passport, flight tickets, some money. That morning itself I had kept the flight tickets in my shirt pocket - so my tickets were there with me , but my passport was not .

I hurriedly went up to the Air France desk , and told them I have lost my passport. The lady said me , "without a passport, you cannnot board the aircraft". Added to that I did not have a Schengen visa , so I could not go anywhere out of the airport. The lady enquired the shuttle buses , and one of them informed that there were no such bag in the bus. My last hope was the second shuttle, which did not call for the last 30 mins, and henceforth the lady from Air France took me to the police where she narrated the happenings to them. They had spoken in French so I could not understand the conversation. I was not in a mood to understand any conversations.. I was only wondering if I could ever go back to India, and when the lady was speaking about the embassy ... I was getting more nervous. I cant describe what went through my mind at that point of time .

I was stranded inside the CDG, Paris Airport ... hoping to catch the next day's flight to Bangalore.

Leaving for Bangalore - the first leg

Earlier Baba had told me several times, when he was posted to Calcutta from Delhi, he did not have sleep that night . I always thought that how can this be possible . On the night of 31st Dec 2008 I also had the same feeling - I did not sleep till 3 am that night.

Today I had left Milwaukee at 1:40 pm for Detroit. In the ticket the arrival timing at Detroit was displayed at 3:50 pm.But on asking a co passenger of mine she replied Detroit is 1 hour ahead of Milwaukee, and the trip duration would be for 45 minutes . I reached Detroit in the scheduled time, and had 2 hours of spend. I started spending the 2 hours visiting shops, checking out the duty free shops, and roaming around . My next flight was on the same terminal/ concourse but was 40-45 gates away ... it was an Air France flight on A60 . Even though I had arrived in the terminal well before time ,I went in for the NWA express train, which was an unmanned electric train connecting terminals.