Fans of Paris can list many reasons why they have affection for what is known as the City of Lights. But passing through Charles de Gaulle Airport isn’t likely to be one of them.

I’ve passed through a number of international airports, from Beijing to Warsaw, Buenos Aires to – most recently – Tirana, Albania. And of all of them de Gaulle is my least favorite.

I’ve only been to Paris itself once, a week-long stay several years ago when I met up with my wife, Mary Pat Treuthart, who had won a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship at a university of law in Lublin, Poland.

I remember that the airport was modeled almost like an art installation, with escalators taking passengers seemingly randomly between several levels. It was almost as if reaching baggage claim was meant to be something you had to appreciate almost as much as the tubular outlines of the Centre Pompidou.

But, then, as I’ve said in past posts, my first hours – stretching into days – of an international trip are often a confusing jumble of jangled nerves and cerebral misalignment. So I may be misremembering. What I do recall are the last two times I had the misfortune to pass through de Gaulle while enroute to other destinations.

The first was, again, a few years ago when I was attempting to join Mary Pat in Rome. My flight was an hour late departing from SeaTac, so I had something like a half hour to rush from our arrival gate to where my Rome flight was departing.

Fat chance. For one, the French channel you along corridors that remind me of the kind that cattle pass through on their way to some abattoir (OK, I admit that’s a bit of an overstatement). Even then, I had to ask some random airport employee if I was headed in the right direction.

Then to get your passport examined, you have to stand in a kind of line that weaves back and forth through roped-off turnstiles, the kind that the folks at Disney rig up at their Pirates of the Caribbean theme ride.

By the time I got through all that, my flight to Rome was long gone. Fortunately, a friendly French woman at the Delta Airlines desk rebooked me on a flight that left a few hours later.

That was the good news. The bad was that I was then required to wait in a glass-enclosed departure lounge, which on that particularly sunny day felt as if I were sweating in a greenhouse. Again, the French style seems to be a classic example of style over substance.

My second experience at coming through de Gaulle was just a few days ago when Mary Pat and I were returning from a three-week European stay, which included a stop in Florence (which I already wrote about), plus a tour both of Albania and the Greek island of Corfu (which I will write about in future).

We’d been scheduled to leave the Athens airport at 6:30 a.m., which necessitated our rising at 4:15, even though we were staying at the pricey Sofitel Athens Hotel that sits basically a two-minute walk from the Air France check-in desks (Air France being a Delta partner). Everything worked out fine, though we were a bit worried about our connection – in De Gaulle – which allowed us only a single hour before our flight home.

Mary Pat even called up Delta and tried to get us booked on a later flight, but she was assured that we’d make the connection no problem. And we did, though the usual trudge through passport control took so long, and our eventual departure gate was so far away, that we literally had to run to make it.

And we did arrive in time, though beginning a 9-hour-plus international flight while bathed in perspiration is not what I call fun.

So much for grumbling about passing through Charles de Gaulle. Now let me vent a bit about Air France.

I’ve flown the French airlines twice now. The first time was, yet again, several years ago when I had been invited to be a juror on a film festival in Kosovo. I ended up sitting in an interior seat in the middle row, with a – I’ll be kind and say husky – guy sitting next to me on the aisle.

That was uncomfortable. What’s worse, though, seemed like the height of irony: It was the food. And I use the term irony with intention, since the French are so proud – and so often rightfully so – of their native cuisine.

Now, everyone complains about airline food. And they have every right to. What most airlines serve on international flights is often so bad that most travelers I know pack their own snacks. They’ll accept the drinks – especially the alcoholic ones – but they’ll pass on what the flight attendants call meals.

On our most recent flight a few days ago, not only were we seated in the two interior seats in the middle row – not what we booked but were reassigned to because of an “equipment change” – but we were offered a pair of inedible choices for our main meal.

One was a vegetarian option (described as “pasta” but actually some sort of grain, maybe couscous, mixed with a red sauce) and a chicken-mushroom dish that resembled something straight out of an elementary-school cafeteria.

At least the ice-cold roll and cheese product that accompanied the meals proved to be something we could wash down. At least it held us until we reached SeaTac.

So let’s be clear: I appreciate France. I admire its cinema, and I even speak a bit (a teeny bit) of its hard-to-pronounce language. But unless I have no other choice, I will never again fly through Paris’ main airport. Nor will I fly Air France.

We may live in, as Voltaire satirically wrote, the best of all possible worlds. But there are better airports, not to mention airlines.