Carbonzero

It’s a quarter past one in the afternoon in Montmartre. I’m sitting in a café right outside Métro Pigalle after having spent the morning looking for a wifi connection.

Annette and I arrived at 6:30 Central European time with 14 hours to kill before our 20h30 flight to Copenhagen. By pure chance Ww’ve already shared a restaurant with the head of a major environmental group and a flight with the Canadian Defence Minister, so I’m already feeling the global importance of the Copenhagen conference.

Since we’re in Paris for the day, we decided to check our bags now rather than haul around weeks of clothing while we roam around Paris.

“Vous allez à Copenhague?” the woman at the Scandinavian Airlines desk asks us. “Are you going to Copenhagen? For the climate change conference?”

We answer in the affirmative. “Vous êtes Canadiens?” I’m extremely pleased that my spoken French places me as a Canadian. I’ve been stubbornly trying to keep my French from sounding Parisian for many years now.

“Everyone is going to Copenhagen,” she tells us of the enormous stream of foreigners heading to the Danish capital. Not just Europeans and Africans, she said, but Chinese, Brazilians… why she even saw some sheiks coming in from the Middle East. “I’ve never seen so many people from so many places come to Copenhagen at the same time.”

I can only imagine. Though my first time in Paris, it seems as if life is going about as usual in the 18th arrondissement. But everything I read about the conference, tea in hand, belies the enormity of the event. I can’t seem to stop reading about the first day at the Summit via news stories, tweets and social network updates.

“It seems as half of my friends are going to be in Copenhagen some time in the next two weeks,” says more than one of my Facebook friends. I know the feeling. I have at least half a dozen temporary European phone numbers at hand, ready to go.

Six hours away, the Eastern seaboard is waking up. Those in my home town of Toronto will arise to see the Toronto Star has joined 56 newspapers in 45 countries in printing the exact same editorial on their front pages, an unprecedented undertaking.

Everywhere I look it seems that the eyes of the world are focused on this two-week conference on the waterway between the North Sea and the Baltic.

I can’t wait to see it for myself.

Original Posting: http://howiechong.com/2009/12/vous-allez-a-copenhague/