Chapter One.Two: à place de la Bastille..

Our first tourist venture was a nightly affair at a very significant Parisian monument that no longer exists. Since by now, we had gotten our hands dirty with the metro, travelling around Paris seemed like second nature for us. The only task that ever remained at any point of time was to locate the nearest terminal and lo, we are off!

A Parisian metro terminal is indicated by a showy board announcing itself or by a circled M sign. Locating the nearest metro terminal involves a peculiar mix of intuition, mobility, keen eyesight and common sense. Keen eyesight and mobility as attributes as pretty much self-explanatory and I won't delve into the common sense aspect of it; a keen sense of direction can help you get yourself to a metro terminal that is closer to your eventual destination that require hopping over numerous hubs.

Some painful hubs like Châtelet-Les-Halles and the main thoroughfares like Gare du Nord sometimes require you to travel as much from one track to the other as you might from a point to point walk. Avoiding the main hubs as much as possible is highly advised. Be prepared with your metro pass while entering one; the ticket barriers are thankfully electronics enabled doing away with any manual intervention.

We stepped out of the metro à la place de la Bastille at about 9 pm into bright daylight. Latitudinally, Paris is probably the northmost I had ever been to; even with the knowledge of
curvatures and daylight savings, it really did seem extremely weird seeing so much light around at a time that is but naturally night!

The place de la Bastille is the site of the famous prison that was stormed and razed (on what is now celebrated as the Bastille Day) and is now commemorated by a July Column in its place. We soaked in the scene for a brief moment of historical nostalgia before we proceeded to the side streets adjoining the square to munch on some local fare. The thumb rule to follow: the more you go away from the main square, the cheaper the fare gets... Of course, the equation is compensated by the quality of the food-stuffs and the ambiance you are presented with..

We, thus, made our first forays into the famed European cobbled and narrow streets. We followed up each narrow street with a narrower one.

The streets adjoining la Place de la Bastille is quite lively at nights, in particular rue de Lappe which is lined with a number of pubs and smoky restaurants. We made our way to one of the pubs and signed-languaged our way to a couple of drinks. Warning: The moment you have decided to sample on a place that is pretty much low scale, plastic money loses all relevance and you better be all pursed up with paper dough.

Dinner was a stand-up affair with crêpes. My choice was a ham- and egg-filled crêpe. The crêpe bears a startling resemblance to the local Indian Dosas; the batter is, however, expertly spread across using a T-shaped apparatus with one end of the lateral T end affixed at the center of the crêpe. No rocket science that. The T, however, allows for a planar crêpe as against a Dosa that assumes layered, concentric circular patterns.

The crêpe is, then, filled with anything that is only limited by the imagination of the chef, as one of us rudely learnt. Sample this on a menu: crêpe à la noix de coco.. Sounds exotic? Trust me, its just dry chapati with dry coconut power...

Note: The image of the Metro board has been sourced from Marta Likes Art-Uh.