Okay, it's true, learning the lingo wasn't exactly top of the priority list when The Irish Times' advance party arrived in Charles De Gaulle airport on Sunday evening: there's football to be watched, and plenty of it. Still, a month or so at the Coupe du Monde seemed like a pretty good opportunity to pick up some basic vocabulary, and it was with considerable excitement that, within minutes of setting foot in the terminal building, I came to grips with my first new word.
Greve, I heard them say. As in, "Pardon, mais il y a une greve" or "les pilotes/porteurs/conducteurs sont en greve". I may not be the snappiest student walking the planet, but pretty soon I'd added the French for strike to my repertoire and, ever since, I've been finding it rather a handy one to have in the armoury.
In fact, the first I heard of it was when the beleaguered man at the Air France transfer desk heard I was a journalist and welcomed me wearily to the "World Cup of Strikes". After an hour-and-a-half of trying to switch from the flight I was booked on onto one that stood some chance of taking off, I was beginning to cotton on to what he was talking about.
As were, for that matter, the couple of hundred Cameroon Airways punters behind me (many of them football fans wearing themed suits that even the most dedicated member of Jack's army would have balked at), almost all of whom had been reduced to a semi-comatose state by some 90 minutes of staring at a carousal onto which an item of luggage rolled every 10 minutes or so.
What airport staff there were about were clearly attempting to maintain as low a profile as possible just in case things turned ugly.
Bizarrely, there didn't ever seem much chance of that. Flights from Scotland, Mexico and Brazil arrived after the one from Yaounde, and while the Scots drowned the place in song - having obviously come close to drowning themselves on the flight over - those kitted out in the whackiest costumes from all four countries were courted by a roving horde of amateur photographers.
Back at the Air France terminal yesterday, about a quarter of flights were taking off, each one producing a dramatic reconstruction of the last plane out of Saigon. On AF7682 to Montpellier nobody knew whether their luggage was coming along for the ride, as the baggage handlers were working, or not, pretty much as the mood took them.
But then nobody, if truth be told, seemed to care all that much. At the other end it was simply the icing on the cake when the bags started to appear and everybody was able to go on their way within half an hour of landing.
For the man from The Irish Times it remained only to make it the 100 kilometres or so to the paper's base in Narbonne, a simple matter of an hour-long train journey which was to be undertaken after sorting out my accreditation.
The latter task went remarkably well, under five minutes in a sparsely populated media tent. But at that point my luck ran out. "I read something in the paper," said the woman at the information desk when asked about a train timetable. "Ah oui, ici," she said pointing to an article on page two of the local paper "il y a une greve".
Sure, I thought to myself, I could have told you that.
