At times its not only about seeing a place its more about feeling a place... and thats what Paris was all about!!
Okay a enough of abouts... the faith on petite German population back fired as we didn't get a reservation on th train for Paris (not to forget we actually went for the reservation one day before our journey)and ironically my dream of visiting Switzerland came true. To reach Paris we had to take a detour via Basel(Switzerland). The next thing was that we missed our free tour by a few minutes. But as it turned out people who managed to take the free tour were cursing themselves for getting stuck with something so boring. After all we are young people trying to have some fun.... all we care about is clicking gorgeous pics and seeing everything that we can in the limited time we have at hand... who cares which duke build up what and when did he die and of what problems...the fact aside the louvre museum did cast it's spell on even freaks like us. The sculptures, paintings and the articles engrossed everyones attention and we were no exception here.Mona Lisa is famous so evryone wanted to see that but i am at a loss to explain why the other masterpices have gone unnoticed.. these french people knew art in the best way in the world, not to forget every sculpture and almost every painting was nude... but thats french style for you. Four hours and we realized that it would take the entire day to see everything in the museum so we gave up... actually my legs gave up. The worst part of our minimum budget trips is that we can't take any guided tours on buses or anything so firstly we have to cover all the attractions on foot and then we often go the wrong direction to double up our troubles.
Notre Dam.... well something that made me look stupid... i actually didn't know it was a church and when friends told me that this is notre dam i was like... 'DAM'mm its a church. But again the carvings and the mind blowing architecture... hats off. The grand palace was again a perfect representation of the french architecture and then there was a place called Port de Itella (something like that) which had a science museum.... the engineer inside us proplled us to take the long journey to the extreme corner of the city to see the place which, being modest, was a huge dissappointment.
The next stop was of course the star attraction.. Eiffel Tower. The glittering tower and the cold fountains in the backdrop left us all amazed.Navam and Gagan joined us here. Familiar faces in unfamiliar terretory, it was a different re-union.
The night cruise was something i personally enjoyed a lot, however can't say the same for the others with me....
Subways, the old grumbling trains and the underground travel,black people (strongly built) staring at you, the violin being played at some corner, the lady with the guitar, couples kissing on the bridges, the magnificient architecture,the flamboyant paintings and sculptures, the not so organised outskirts, the omnipresent river siene..... truely there was a gush of some strange emotions inside me, something i had never felt before.
Keeping a track of time and going as per some plan has never been our thing so as it turned out... we had a great day and even better evening and at 12 in the night we had no clue where to go.
I had heard of some gurudwara in the outskirts of paris so we headed for that place but you can't expect anybody to be up for you at 1 am. So it again turned into another freezing night at the station. How-ever at 4 am in the morning when we went inside the gurudwara seeing the lovely treatment metted out to us, the respect for Sikhism that i had has surged many folds..
Humanity can be a synonym for sikhism. The wonderful breakfast the cozy beds and above all the warm behaviour of those people is something i'll remenber forever in my life.
The next day it was first of all a two hour long queue for scaling the Eiffel tower and then the astonishing view of this artistic town from a height of 324 metres.. wow now i knew why people find paris so romantic.Then there were many notable monuments including the white church and the largest palace... Versailles we visited but what attracted my attention the most were the streets and the musical atmosphere, the lively people.. a completely different world it is :)
On our way back we had a stop-over at Stuttgart where we got to find out everything about mercedes-benz... right from the discovery of the combustion engine to latest model that is to hit the streets soon..
Won't extend this very long but all the car lovers know how it feels to be amongst the most vintage vehicles of all and then descending into all the latest wheels on road.. had a nice time but three days on the continuity and the tired bodies got the better of our never daunted enthusiasm this time and we decided to skip the porche museum... some other day may be
This wonderful time in europe has really helped me discover the traveller with vivid tastes inside me.... hope i can keep it the same way throughout now!!
sb
No comments:
Post a Comment