Pandora in Paris

4:30 am is not a time of the day when your alarm screams below ur pillow and you feel grateful to the tiny appliance for having done the honours of waking you up. Just like any normal being, I felt like throwing it off to the other corner of the room! But this was not one of 'those' days. It was the day of the Paris trip on a Saturday morning, and I darn well wasn't going to miss my money spent on the flight booking. So there I got up and in 2 hours was there at the Stuttgart airport - all sleepy-eyed but ready to take the plunge to... PARIS!

Charles de Gaulle Airport does a great job of confusing the hell out of it's unsuspecting passengers. Its huge, its a whole city out there with isolated gigantic terminals spread miles from each other! But we were lucky to get out of there without wasting much time - and soon we were on the RER that took us bang-on to the center of the city.

Every other person you see on the Paris streets is a tourist - and if you commit the fallacy of asking them for directions, you might be bombarded with any random language on earth. However, French in all broken avtaars seemed to rule the roost. I recalled my shabbily taken French beginner's course back in B-school, and it guiltfully reminded me of the apparent benefits of a well-learnt foreign lingo. Hmmm.... I should've known earlier...

The mother of all museums - The Louvre
The very place where Dan Brown's masterpiece begins was something to watch out for. Though the whole detailed visit of the museum would require a couple of days, we rushed through that in 3 hours - call it 'Desi paisa-wasooli' 'cos we had many other places to cover in only 2 days!

At the museum, among the thousands of first-time tourists with amused eyes, there were species of a different kind. Art enthusiasts, historians, archeologists, numismatists, all with a penchant for art that would've given Robert Langdon a serious complex.

The Mona Lisa was superb, to say the least! Then we were at the glass pyramid outside that has so frequent mentions in the cult book. The feeling was of rememberances and relating the things we saw to the things we had read in 'The Da Vinci Code'. Makes me think - 'yeah, maybe we wouldn't have enjoyed seeing this museum so much had it not been for Dan Brown's book.... '

Eiffel Tower at night is a marvel! Its a magic done in lights which can be visible from miles away.We decided to enjoy the visual brilliance there and go up its canopy the during the daytime the next day. The frustating wait of 2-3 hours for a 20 odd mins stay up at the top can get to ones nerves, but we still waited, ever-expectant. The view from the top was MIND-BLOWING! Sriram, my buddy, managed to pay a visit to the loo up there (all of 300 mts height) and he proudly took home a memory of pissing at the highest point of Paris! :-)

There were quite a few other great places that we saw. The best part was our open-air tour bus that took us around town with its 8-language Audio tour (who cared about the other 7 languages anyway :-)). Saw the Moulin Rouge Cabaret Theatre from the outside - the same place where the Nicole Kidman musical was shot. As our open air bus passed through that street (Boulevard de Clichy), the unending array of Sex shops and Massage Parlors became visible - the most conspicuous being the Museum of Eroticism (Musee de l'Erotisme). Enough to give the Indian moral police a massive heart attack!

What I'd surely remember were the Place de la Concorde, Champs-Elysées, Chapel at Notre Dame and the Opera. Places like Château de Versailles and Paris Disneyland were reluctantly skipped - so really 2 days are not enough! A good few hours were spent meandering through the streets and boulevards which were tastefully lined up with Cafes and bistros on both sides of the pavement, serving the choiciest of French wine. Couples - ah, they were all over the place! (and their hands too were all over the place... lolz... :-) )

2 days of hustled tourism, of overdoses in medevial history, of beauty totally man-made, of boulevards, palaces, chapels and top-views, of our aching legs but contented eyes - Paris trip is something wouldn't dilute so easily from the mind. All in all, such an eventful trip surely deserves a longer write-up but these are the times of brevity and rushed schedules.

Paris is a complex city. It breathes and lives art. It has massive structures that take you back to the medevial times, it has a underground metro and a sewage system that beats almost every other city hands down, it has a major migrant population giving an extremely cosmopolitian look, its congested yet beautiful, rushy yet sophisticated, pompous yet pleasurable. This city truly makes romantics out of skeptics with its alluring history and charming modern-day buzz.

It's the city of Love.

At the Louvre's Glass Pyramid


See the shadow of the Eiffel?


Another view of the Siene. (and the adjoining Football field)


The Moulin Rouge