Chapter One.Six: To the Louvre

The metro ride to the place de l'Opera (plaa-s the lope-ay-raa) was ridden by multiple hub points being closed (for maintenance) due to which we spent close to an hour getting to a place which we could walked over from the Eiffel Tower in a lesser time. What gives eh?

Having eventually taken a circuitous route to the place de l'Opera, we met up with the acquaintances and exchanges the necessary pleasantries before we set out on out first marathon walk. Destination one: Musée du Louvre (myoo-say dyoo loo-vre). It was close to 4PM when we decided to walk the walk. Kindly note the time; its relevance will be enlightened later.

Getting to the Louvre from place de l'Opera is just a matter of walking down the mammoth avenue de l'Opera. The avenue is lined by structures depicting some awesome baroque architectural influences and offers plenty of opportunities to capture them into frames like the fountain with the angelic fountainhead depicted here.

Walking on cobblestonened paths can be an extremely painful experience especially if you are wearing footwear with soles that boast of widths next to nothing. And I was one of the exponents of the said experience which made the situations about to follow that much more difficult to swallow.

A cursory glance over the leaf of the map we were carrying spoke about the visitor timings
for the Louvre. Taking special interest in the same (since we were aware that Louvre grants free access to tourists for a certain number of hours on certain weekdays), we realized that the museum closes entry at 5:15 PM. That when we were approaching the rue de Rivoli (roo the Ree-vo-lee), the intersection at which the Louvre is located.

We staggered into the Louvre grounds through the impressive arched gates and were confronted with the enormously grafted, thoroughly architected Louvre palace which now serves as the home to the museum. The palace is grand in the real sense of the word and is shaped as a rectangle with one of its sides knocked off in its plan view. The ugly beauty spot in the scheme of things therein is the glass pyramid that serves as the entrance to the museum.

The structure has come in for a lot of flak from purists who argue that a modern artifact has no place among things so serene and artistic. All said, it does add a contradictory notion of beauty the way rightly placed moles seem to make some faces that much more desirable!

With entry denied to the Dan Brown-made-populous monument, we continued our walk after some necessary levels of photo-capturing.

Coconut Grove, Samarkand and Queens..

Team lunches, in the recent past, have turned out to be à la carte affairs as against the famous buffets that Bangalore is really famous for. An à la carte experience just goes to show you how much you end up missing out on when you treat yourself to a buffet. And the magnitude is a notch up if you are in a city like Bangalore where luncheon affairs tend to buffets thanks to the no-brainer experience [in terms of choosing from the menu] and the time-based factors.

Coconut Grove (no relation to the Pune based eatery of the same name) is located on Church Street and primarily caters to the Keralite, Mangalorean and Coorgi cuisine. Keralite cuisine tends to be very generous in its coconut base while Coorgi cuisine is pork-based and tinged with various spices. Paying heed to the specialty that the restaurant boasted of, we feasted on Mangalorean fried prawns and Kodagu Pandi Masala for starters. Kodagu Pandi Masala, which translates to Coorgi Pork Masala, is a preparation of marinated pork in various spices. The preparation is essentially dry and the meat is extremely well cooked and tender, which is a feature of the Coorgi cuisine.

Entrées were a sea-food and pork affair as well, with Karimeen Vevichathu and Kodagu Pandi Curry. While the pork curry shares qualities with the starter in terms of the cuisine that it represents, Karimeen Vevichathu is a Keralite preparation which is, surprisingly, not prepared on a coconut base. The gravy is a thin onion tinged, tamarind-based gravy with the fish being baked/boiled while the gravy is being soaked into the fish. Coming from Kerala, this was a welcome change personally and I highly recommend the same to be sampled with some plain steamed rice.

Samarkand is located on Infantry Road and caters more to the Awadhi and Moghlai taste buds. An interesting conceptual theme encouraged here, eating with one's own hands! Cutlery is available solely upon request. That set the tone for the lunch to follow. Samarkand does not boast of a very comprehensive menu but one must sample the choice of the day that is the chef's specialty. That said, the meal consisted of Galawati Kebabs, Moghlai Dum Biryani and a Gosth Rann preparation which was the chef's specialty. Galawati kebab consists of minced lamb meat served on top of a fried cake, probably wheat based. The kebab is spruced up with a range of chutneys ranging from spicy onion to mayonnaise. Once sampled, the cake melts in your mouth forming a spicy paste with the chutney and the minced meat. Highly recommended!!

Dum Biryani was interestingly served on a pan covered with a coating of atta which keeps the dum warm ultimately leading to the hardening of the atta covering. Serving the biryani requires one to break open the pan covering. The biryani and the gosht rann (lamb served with yogurt and spice-based gravy) combination was plentiful in spices like cloves leaving us wanting for more.

Queens' is again located on Church Street and for once, is known more for its North-Indian vegetarian options than the non vegetarian ones. This was reflected in practice as well wherein we sampled the some heavenly stuffed capsicum with murg palak (Chicken served in a spinach based gravy). The stuffed capsicum beat the meat hands down making sure that a recall was definitely on the cards.

Chapter One.Five: At the Eiffel Tower

Rounding a couple of street corners from the public scene, we chanced upon the monument of steel that has now become the face of Paris on any travel brochure or Bollywood flick. People were roller blading and jogging around on that calm May day. Families were smiling their brilliant smiles which were in turn being captured by the multitudinous point and shooters.

The monument is perfect in its symmetry and foolish in its sheer size. One can't begin to fathom what could possibly have possessed Gustave Eiffel to design something so mammoth and beautiful. Standing under the extremely gigantic structure is when you begin to realize that there is absolutely no way a human hand can touch the surface.

The bases of the tower are a consortium of your friendly souvenir stores and ticket counters. Long snaking lines filled with chattering humans waiting to get onto the lift that will carry them to the top so that they can see what they could have seen up close at ground level. Boards claim information that the average waiting time in the queue is 20 minutes. I do not suspect that estimate at all.

Lunch was an Eiffel-side affair of cold sandwiches. The meaning of a cold sandwich took an entirely different meaning for me that day when I was chewing into my cold beef sandwich. My tortured mandibles were losing a battle against my screaming tummy when I realized that in Europe, cold sandwiches had every aspect of the raw materials cold, including the bread. Sitting on the lawn, gnawing on the bread and looking up at the looming steely beauty, noon passed us by and laziness crept upon us.

Having had our fill of the tower, we decided to move onto other eyefills. We had to meet a couple of acquaintances who were coming down to Paris for the evening which meant having to spend some time with them. The rendezvous was set up at the Paris Opera house from where a number of landmarks were walkable. Back to the dear Paris metro terminal where again I had a minor embarrassing moment when I could not find my metro pass while exiting the terminal. Mr.X again to the rescue and he found the pass conveniently lodged between the pages of my passport. Mr.X could not stop smirking at the prospective score: 2 - 0 to his advantage.

Chapter One.Four: A public embarrassment

Le Metropolitan, true to its word, stays underground unlike many of its pseudo-cousins around the world which cover only partial routes under the abovegroud. It rises occasionally to habitable geographies only to cross the river Seine; all such occasions are a welcome opportunity to feast one's sights on visions that are, subjectively, a lot better than those of dark and dreary tunnels.

It was such a sight that confronted and presented us with our first full-length view of the Eiffel Tower; which was looming besides when the metro taxi emerged and banked into the terminal serving the Eiffel Tower. We alighted to hostile conditions of threatening clouds and biting cold; all necessary conditions that, consequently, lead to a heavy bladder. Which eventually caused me/us our first public embarrassment.

Warning: A public restroom, the kind that we are used to back in India, is a myth in Europe. All such services requires one to part with at least a €uro.

Fact: Parisian sidewalks are dotted, at large, with free restrooms, which may be recognized by the boards stating Toilettes - Accès Gratuit (tuah-lai-th aa-ksai graa-tyoo-ee). One such board was sighted by me in the symptomatic condition that I described above. An added bonus was the complete absence of a queue, which was definitely an invitation considering the premium that is usually set on devices of such welcome nature.

Putting the fact and the warning together, I took the most natural action any sane human wanting to take a leak would. I ventured into it.

Having figured out a way of getting into the contraption, I relieved myself and came face to face with my predicament. The rest room showed no indication of a flushing mechanism save for a lever and a button. The lever yielded nothing. Then came the epochal moment when I depressed the button.

No flush responded but the door began sliding open. My willful attempts to halt its progress was all in vain and the door, purposefully, followed its tracked path. My concern at the opening door was circumvented by the immense relief I derived from my knowledge that the restroom was not being waited upon by other tourists. When the door slid open completely, I was presented with a long queue of French tourists, all exchanging friendly French exchanges. The lady at the head of the line smiled at me and waited expectantly for me to vacate, while I was at wits end; both at the sudden formation of the queue and the realization that the rest room was in an unflushed state.

Stupidity followed and I tried my anglicized French on the lady, asking her the needful procedure to perform a complete cleanup. She appeared confused and irritated now that I was blocking her entry. My master stroke: I called out to my friend, Mr. X, who also wanted to take a leak but was not among the queued people. He came forth and I explained the problem to him. I asked him to use the rest room so that at least he could figure out the flushing mechanism.

With that, I vacated and the rest room was then occupied by Mr. X. This was not welcomed by the enqueued tourists who exchanged glances of disbelief and annoyance. Mr. X seemed to take an eternity while the tourists were getting more and more pissed (pun intended) with incident. I was twitching nervously since my neck was only fingers away from the queuing members. Voices began rising and soon, someone began kicking on the door of the rest room. Eventually, the door slid open and Mr. X stepped out calmly with an amused look on his face.

We walked away purposefully while the kindly lady, who had smiled at me, eventually got to use the rest room. Walking away, I inquired of Mr.X as to the flushing mechanism to be followed. He calmly claimed that he, too, failed to flush the loo.

Walking away hurriedly to avoid any legal actions, my heart went out to that old lady who was presented the loo in that condition.....


P.S. - I still claim ignorance of the mechanism to be followed.

Note: The image of the free public toilets has been sourced from Master_Raik's Flickr profile.

Chapter One.Three: Arc de Triomphe and Champs Elysées

The next day dawned a little too early as they do in the areas so close to the polar regions. Breakfast was a cereal, bread and juicy affair in the hostel. Primary task for the day was to make arrangements for our way out of Paris. Onwards to Gare de Lyon to make the rail reservations. We planned to make all our travel by night trains to save on accomodations costs for the night. Bright idea huh?

Fortunately, the reservation windows mentioned which windows were being served by English speaking representatives. Our plans hit the first roadblock when we were told that the
nightly services to Rome (which was out next destination) from Paris passes through Switzerland as a result of which we could not be allotted reservations on the service. This, due, to the fact that Schenghen visas do not cover the Swiss state. This left us with the only option of using the day service to Rome, reaching a night earlier in Rome. Dreams of smart economy by nightly transits vapourizing... With the reservations for the next morning done, we left for our continued exploration of Paris. Onto L'Arc de Triomphe..


Arc de Triomphe is a memorial for the unknown soldier in lines with the India Gate in Delhi. Besides being remarkable in its architecture, it also forms one end of the famed Champs Elysées. The avenue is one of the landmarks of Paris and is lined with cafés, theatres and designer labels showing off their wares for mortals practicing window shopping. The other end of the Champs Elysées is marked by Place de la Concorde, which eventually gives way to some other famed Dan Browned landmarks.

Our spirited walk down the famed avenue was short lived with tidbits of window shopping thrown in, including a choicy Renault showroom and a ripoff Adidas sports-zone. Partly down the avenue, practicality got the better of us and we decided to do something more fruitful than walking the walk. Onto the metro 500 metres away to make our way to the metallic Eiffel Tower that was rising just to the south, across the Seine.