PARIS 16/12--Arrived at Orly Airport this morning, concluding what was a foggy, frostbitten and deeply satisfying stay in Berlin. The episode of airline customer abuse as I hopped from Tegel to Orly was conspicuously swift, though I was ready to cooperate after catching an untranslated glimpse of this story in a copy of some gentleman's newspaper on the U-bahn.

No bomb. But that was fairly hard for me to discern, processing, from over this gruff commuter's shoulder, only the words "Flughafens Tegel" and "Bombendrohung." Memories of the tubby men with guns who had throughout my visit prevented entry to the Reichstag and the British Embassy--a state of play which I quickly realized was due to terrorist threats--seemed to justify a cautious assumption of an affirmative Bombendrohung. Factor in the unclaimed suitcase adjacent my seat in the dirty underground rail car and it made for an anxious, sexed-up, but ultimately misapprehended morning.

In stark contrast, at the moment things are positively mellow. My friend Michael has chosen to host me during my brief holiday in Paris. After some vulgar pleasantries and a six-second tour of his new digs he fled to take a final exam with noticeable trepidation. He might have characterized his exam efforts as a Bombendrohung.
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