Sanctuary Of Random Keystrokes

Montmartre offers beautiful views of the Paris even on a rainy day.

There is a funicular train that takes you up the mountain, but we chose a leisurely climb up the stairs. At the foot of the last set of stairs, we came across this rather bizarre tribute to Charles de Gaulle:

The stairs ended at the Basilica of Sacré Cœur:

From here we walked to the artist’s district.

The atmosphere here was quite festive. A lot of painters were creating and selling their works at a square surrounded by tens of cafés. In this age of digital photography and photoshop, getting your caricature sketched by a real artist is still remarkably popular at Montmartre.

This realistic face of clay built into a wall near the square spooked us for moment:

We walked back through the lovely cobbled streets in search of the Metro station for a train back to Rue de Rivoli.

After window-shopping for a few minutes at Rue de Rivoli, we started our walk to the Eiffel Tower.

It seemed closer with every turn we took and every road we crossed, but it took us 90 minutes to get to the tower’s precincts.

I had always imagined Eiffel Tower to be silver in colour. What stood before me was rust-coloured. It was, however, several times grander than what the pictures had led me to believe. Eiffel Tower is an extremely difficult subject to photograph and not because of the size alone. When you are in front of something that is as frequently photographed as the Eiffel Tower, it is hard to take a picture that’ll have anything worthwhile to say. At the same time, it is impossible to be at the Eiffel Tower and not take a photo. Well, here is another picture of Eiffel Tower that you have seen before:

We were so tired by now that a pit stop at the hotel seemed prudent. Since the Arc de Triomphe was so close, how could we not chose a route that would involve going past it:

The Eiffel Tower at night is a very different place from the Eiffel Tower in the day. The “regular” illumination at night is supplemented by a burst of bright glittering lights that flit about the tower like giant fireflies. This burst comes for 5 minutes every hour, on the hour.

We made a mad dash from the nearest Metro station to the tower and reached there just in time for the 10:00 PM “sparkle”. Everyone around us broke into a loud cheer the moment the lights came on. We highly recommend lying down in the grass and staring at the Eiffel Tower at night for a few minutes as a way of ending your visit to Paris.

The reason we couldn’t find the Apple store at the Louvre was because it was in a mall underground. The steps didn’t look like they would lead you to anything significant. On the directory at the entrance of the mall, Apple is listed as the first entry under Leisure/Culture/Gifts.

[To my French-ignorant eyes, loisirs looks like losers misspelt.]

We spent another hour or two roaming in the gardens outside the Louvre (Jardin de Tuileries). The fountains and their usual inhabitants: the ducks, the pigeons and the sea-gulls, never bore me.

Then there were statues all around us, many of which wore such dramatic, pained expressions that I almost started feeling bad for them.

While some trees were showing signs of the impending autumn, it was by and large very green.

We emerged near Place de la Concorde…

…and began our search for the nearest metro station to get to Montmarte.

With 14 lines, the map of Paris looks complex and intimidating at first.

(You can find the original PDF on the RATP website)

It is however surprisingly easy to navigate.

Metros of big cities are a world of their own. My first impression of the Paris Metro from outside was this entrance to Les Gobelins:

Goblins? An old man holding a gun? It takes very little imagination to start worrying about exactly what you’ll below.

And the entrance to Place d’Italie looks like an entrance to a seat of witchcraft:

The reality of course is a lot more mundane. It’s an underground world of weary morning commuters nodding in sleep to the rhythm of the train. It’s a world of fluorescent lights and of massive metallic monsters pushing dank columns of wind through the tunnels.

It gets a little spooky when your train stops inside a tunnel for no apparent reason. The one time it happened to us, a very talented street (train?) performer kept our minds from working themselves into anxiety:

Each station of the Paris metro is a little different from the other. Of the stations we boarded a train from, the Concorde station still stands out in our memory for its walls covered in tiles of letters like a giant word search puzzle.

The overground stations are less interesting, but the views from the train you board from there compensate for it:

The trains of the Paris metro are a mix of the old and the new. A lot of older ones have latches that you turn clockwise to trigger the doors to open. The seasoned commuters work them 4-5 seconds before the train comes to a complete halt, and dart off in a hurry.

Most trains have folding seats near the entrance. We saw an episode which we are sure is repeated everyday. A tourist would sit on one of these folding seats, momentarily get up to help someone with their luggage, in the meanwhile the seat would fold back, the tourist would try to sit on a now non-existent seat, much hilarity would ensue.

We used the metro a lot to get around in Paris. You can buy individual tickets for €1.75 or a lot of 10 for €12.50. On our last day, we bought a spare lot just to make sure that we have an excuse to come to Paris again.

Update: Added more pictures of the Paris Metro on Oct 24, 2011.

We walked in the general direction of Notre Dame, mesmerized by the beautiful Parisian streets.

I recalled this line about German from Miland Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being – “In Kant’s language, even “Good Morning,” suitably pronounced, can take the shape of metaphysical thesis.” This could be applied to the French of old TV magazines lying abandoned on Paris streets.

As we got closer to Notre Dame, the buildings’ adornments became more detailed:

Opposite Notre Dame is Shakespeare and Company – an old bookstore selling first and second-hand English books (estd. 1951 – which sounds relatively recent in the larger context of the city we were in, but still) . It was what all old bookstores are – a portal to a universe where time slows down.

This is the first time I encountered a water fountain of this quaint design:

Coming from India, where you don’t trust the water from your kitchen’s tap, let alone a public fountain, we had a hard time convincing ourselves to fill our water bottle here.

Notre Dame was a beautiful giant with an insatiable appetite for tourists. But it was the refined appetite of a connoisseur, and the giant was in no hurry to bolt its food. The slow-moving serpentine queues of tourists are why we are keeping visits to insides of cathedrals and museums for the winter. Besides, I am sure on cold, short days, the promise of warmth indoors will render these places doubly inviting.

Outside Notre Dame is a patch of bushes where you can feed birds. It’s dominated by pigeons (surprise surprise!) and sparrows that are more than willing to eat out of your hands (in the most literal sense) as long as you hold still and present the illusion of being a statue for a short while.

More walking and more gaping at the buildings like a bumpkin-seeing-a-city-for-the-first-time followed, and just when we thought it couldn’t get any grander, we found ourselves on the Rue de Rivoli:

They tell you not to judge a book by its cover. I wonder if the adage would hold true for judging houses (palaces actually) by their doors:

The courtyard of the Louvre has a row of tiny platforms for people to stand on and have their picture taken against the backdrop of the glass pyramid. Not everyone poses passively. I saw this gentleman give his all to his jump from the platform at least twice: one hopes he eventually got something for his Facebook page.

I really wanted to visit the Apple store at the Louvre – nothing like a heady cocktail of history and 21st century consumerism. Now, according to Google Maps, the store was close to where we were standing, but we didn’t see anything remotely like it. We wondered if our empty stomachs were addling our brains. We trundled back to the nearest metro line and promised to visit again the next day.

Paris is a mere 3-hour journey from Amsterdam by train. It was only a matter of time before we paid a visit. The ride on Thalys must’ve been the fastest train journey of my life.

The first thing I noticed the moment I emerged from the labyrinth that is Paris Metro was how open the city felt. I had read about Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, but to be walking down those streets is something else altogether.

You don’t get very far if you are walking with a camera – for there is something remarkable at every turn and corner.

We (the collective pronoun when used without a context is for the inclusion of the wife into the narrative) wanted to lunch at the crêpe shops on Rue de Mouffetard. The one crêperie we found open at that time was run by a Sri Lankan chap who kept drawing our attention to how similar crêpes are to dosas. Thankfully, the one he prepared for us didn’t taste like one (largely due to generous helpings of Nutella and bananas).

It’s hard to walk on a tummy full of crêpes, but walk we did and reached the Panthéon. The beauty and the grandeur of the building took my breath away. I wasn’t sure if I had it in me to take a semi-decent picture of the Panthéon, so I contended myself with the buildings around it.

The Eiffel Tower made its first appearance in the background here:

Our next destination, after a brief stop at McDonalds (which was a bigger hit with the tourists for the paid loo than for the food)…

…was the Palais du Luxembourg.

You can spend hours here walking amidst the green lawns and flowerbeds.

Then there are lifelike statues that cover a range of subjects – from animals, to mythical beings to royal personages of the past.

We found ourselves chairs near a huge basin where children were playing with model sailboats. It is quite a sight to see their tiny sails catch wind and glide across the water (a bit like the view from our window on most days – just scaled down several times).

This statue of Marguerite d’Angoulême seemed to wonder if, after years of standing still, it was now time to sit down.

Having walked for as long as we did, we could understand her predicament, but it’s hard to sit down for long when Notre Dame and the Louvre await you…

One of the many reasons that my wife and I were excited about our move to the Netherlands was that our visas would allow us to travel freely within the EU zone. We lined up a trip to another European country the very week our visas arrived. Going to a relatively obscure German city might not be as grand an occasion as flying to Paris, but the fact that it would entail doing something that was forbidden just a few days ago was the only justification we needed.

Aachen is just a 50-minute bus ride away from Maastricht, which in turn is a 2-hour 30-minute train ride away from Amsterdam. On a Sunday that promised lots of sunshine and little rain, we packed our bags and set out on our maiden voyage across the border. The railways here carry out a lot of repair work during summers. In order to minimize the inconvenience to daily commuters, some of the more disruptive repairs are scheduled over the weekend. Our trip happened to fall on a Sunday when extensive train re-routing lengthened our journey to Maastricht by an hour.

From Maastricht, we caught the international bus that goes to Aachen every 30 minutes. The crossing of the border itself was event-less: I wasn’t expecting a Checkpoint Charlie, but there ought to have been something more to crossing into a new country than noticing that urls on posters now ended in .de rather than .nl. The other sign was the occasional appearance of the German flag that a patriotic soul or two displayed from their houses.

Gradually, the view from our bus window began to change. The architecture became grander, the roads wider and the cars on the road got bigger. Amsterdam is a beautiful city, but it has not been conceived on the same scale as, say, London. After two months in Amsterdam, we felt a little intimidated by a town in Germany.

By the time we got down at Aachen, it was well over 1:00 PM. In an unfamiliar place, no familiar sight exercises a greater power over hungry tourists than McDonalds. They had a veggie burger on their menu, to order which we had to resort to an awkward mix of sign-language and broken English. The apparent belief amongst the people manning the counter there was that “Bitten” is that magical German word, which, if spoken with the right intonation, can bridge the gap between any language and German.

We had almost forgotten that English is not ubiquitous in Europe. The Dutch, especially in bigger cities, probably speak the best English in all of continental Europe. While the programming in TV here is meticulously subtitled (to the point that whenever an American soap refers to 911, it’s subtitled to 112 – the emergency number in The Netherlands), it is rarely dubbed. Sure there is plenty of original programming in Dutch and sometimes the narrative in shows like Master Chef USA is redone in Dutch, but most other programming – from cartoons to soaps to movies – gets aired unmolested. So while the formal English education here does not start in kindergarten, the ambient exposure to the English language begins at home at a very early age.

We ran into the language barrier once more. We were looking for a way to the main church and asking a passer by on road got us:

“Judge? I don’t know what you mean. I don’t know judge.”

Asking for “the Dom” worked, though it took great effort for the person to string together sentences that would register as English on our ears. A building that still stands after 1200+ years is impressive for just being there.

But whoever said about looking for inner beauty probably had this church in mind. The intricate and colourful mosaic work on the walls and roof will make sure that you step out with a crick in your neck.

Also, looking at the predominant use of blue and gold, it’s hard not to think of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers and Starry Night.

Most smaller cities in Europe seem to be remarkably similar in their planning. The townhall and the main market are a few minutes walk away from the town’s main church. This being a Sunday, most shops were closed. You can still window-shop and take away memories (and in my case, pictures) of things cute and strange.

This mannequin, for example, looked like an unfinished commission for Hillary Clinton at Madam Tussauds.

After a few hours of walking in the market, we took the bus back to Maastricht Station and braced ourselves for a long train journey back home. As the sun set, our train rushed pass small towns and tree-lined roads bathed in golden sunlight.

We are a big fan of journeys by train but a train ride in silence, especially after a day of walking in a new city, is a wonderful thing.