Paris Day 1 & 2 – 29th, 30th Dec 1995
Arrival
29 Dec 1995
Six of us – Jayesh, Vipul, Amar, BG, Venky, and me – all working in the UK through ICIM, decided to go to Paris for the new year weekend. We almost didn’t go, thanks to a public transport strike in France. Then the strike ended and the holidays were still there and tourist mania struck, so there we were.
We set off Friday night from Victoria Coach Station.
The standard route for UK-based Indians doing Europe on a budget: coach to Dover, ferry to Calais, coach on into Paris. The crossing took just over an hour. The ferry was supposed to be the dramatic part – other travellers had stories of a violent Channel, pitching decks, everyone turning green. Ours was almost an anticlimax. You never quite lose sight of land at any point on the crossing; you are looking at the English shore or the French one. We walked the duty-free shops and the bars and stood on the open deck in the night wind and the Channel offered us nothing. It cheated us.
We reached the French port Calaise (pronounced Calay, spelt differently for some warped reason) too soon – an hour and fifteen minutes, and there we were in a different country, where they don’t (or won’t, in some cases) speak English.
30 Dec 1995
Paris at 6:30 in the morning: grey, drizzling, a city still deciding whether to be awake. We got to the metro at Gallieni and found our way to the youth hostel by 7:30. French station names did not yield to pronunciation – we had developed an internal phonetic system for them within the group – and speaking French was not going to happen.
The man at the hostel reception was a smiling moron. He smiled. He nodded. He did nothing else. The morning shift girl arrived at 8:15 and proceeded, without acknowledging us or offering any apology, to read her mail, call her friends, and chat to every member of staff who drifted through. We waited forty-five minutes. When we finally checked in we were told the rooms would not be available until 3pm.
First taste of what to expect, as it turned out.
We had a surprisingly good breakfast, hurried ablutions, and set off to see the Louvre before we could go to sleep.
The Louvre
The Louvre is a massive stone building shaped like a square U, with I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid for an entrance. Inside it was warm and dry, which on a drizzling December morning was a significant mercy. There are three sections – I forget their names – and we had three days and the kind of time pressure that prevents real looking. We found the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo. The third section had some genuinely brilliant modern sculptures and paintings. The first two sections were full of paintings that were fine and detailed and depicted historical events I knew nothing about, with titles in French I couldn’t read, and I could not make myself care about them under the circumstances. You need months for the Louvre. We had about forty-five minutes.
The older paintings had a great many nudes. By the end of the second section you stopped noticing. The sculptures were made as god – or man, in this case – made them. The souvenir shop had a lot of closely packed things. I bought a few: a print of the Louvre in a summer sunset I hadn’t seen, a small sphinx I’d never be able to photograph properly. The kind of nostalgia you acquire in advance of the experience.
The Arc de Triomphe
Then we went to the Arc de Triomphe – built to commemorate all the war victories of Napoleon, but ironically he died before it was completed. It looks a bit like India Gate and has what seemed like a million spiral steps to the top. Again, on a clear day, you can see a lot of Paris from up there, but of course it wasn’t a clear day, so we saw a lot of mist and fog and hazy structures, and pointed to each other what we thought was the Eiffel tower.
Meanwhile, we were hungry, so we opened our bags on top of the Arc de Triomphe and ate biscuits and ‘chiwda’ and chips in the rain, oblivious. At some point, a French man approached and accused us, with great feeling and in sign language, of littering – even threatened to throw us down if we didn’t stop eating. How dare we corrupt the pristine beauty and cleanliness of the place! Believe me, Paris is a dirty city – if it had the population of Bombay, it would be positively filthy. The gall of the accusation was unbelievable – we were, in fact, diligently putting everything back into our bags and had not thrown a single wrapper. If nothing else put me off the whole day (which is not true!), this certainly did.
Wandering around
From the Arc de Triomphe to the Louvre is supposedly one of the most romantic walks in Paris – the Champs-Élysées, a long wide boulevard connecting the two. I fumed and fretted along most of it. It was still raining. We were all tired. Jayesh felt unnecessarily guilty for having organised the trip, as though he were personally responsible for the weather. We passed the Obelisk of Luxor standing in the middle of the Place de la Concorde, and a giant Ferris wheel installed nearby for tourists to photograph the city from above. We got on for a slow ride.
Ate French dosas – they call them crepes, made from maida I suspect – from carts along the Champs-Élysées – rolled, with chocolate sauce inside. The only French delicacy I tasted the whole trip, being a vegetarian. If you have a sweet tooth, they are good. Vipul gave it the thumbs down.
Our walk continued across a very wet and marshy Tuileries garden. Supposed to look beautiful in full bloom, but we had to pick our way carefully across the yellowish muddy path avoiding puddles and quick sand (the last is obviously an exaggeration). Finally we got back to the youth hostel. Boy was it a hectic day! I just went to sleep, and heard later from the others that dinner wasn’t worth the effort.
