Paris Je Taime

The UK’s August bank holiday always falls between C’s and my birthdays, giving us reason to do something interesting every year. For the 2015 one, we planned Paris. It was the first trip C and I made together after our wedding. There were two primary reasons for doing that – C really liked the city (after his two previous trip there) and France was a relatively easier embassy when it came to granting the Schengen visa. This was before the attacks last November. 

I was not particularly fascinated by the fascinating Paris and agreed to go if C managed the visa process. I had obviously not recovered from the mammoth UK visa process from early in the year. 

And so he did everything – visas, Eurostar tickets, Airbnb, and the works. I took on two responsibilities – planning an evening to watch cabaret and a day out in the Champagne area. The first one wasn’t bad. Moulin Rouge was very clearly an expensive deal. And they know they are expensive, so they recommend another cabaret in the Moulin Rouge Group, called La Nouvelle Eve on the same website. It is more affordable and I conveniently booked a table for the both of us. 

Read on to know more about Champagne.

We arrived in Paris on the night of Friday, August 28th. The city was quite filthy. My I’m-in-Europe-for-the-first-time eyes were surprised. But Paris is known for it. Next step: finding young English-speaking kids employed by the transport authority to help tourists navigate the train system. It was a bit sad, but I was happy that at least they had some kind of a job. 

St. Pancras, London

Because C thinks I'm like those in the background

I had a disappointing goat cheese wrap at McDonald’s for dinner and we retired at our beautiful Airbnb for the night. 

The next day was dedicated to Reims to see the wonderful, romantic world of Champagne. We took a high speed TGV train which got us to Reims within two hours. The moment we reached there I realised I had made a huge blunder. Reims is a small town with various champagne brands having their original war-time cellars located in the area. For a real, green tour through vineyards (what I had in mind), you need to be able to drive a few miles into the countryside from Reims. C hated what I had done. I hated what I had done. We’d spent a significant amount of money on those trains. But we swallowed the stupid emotions and started walking. It was a hot day. I really didn’t want to walk. On the side I was still trying to check on my phone if there was a way to get to a vineyard somehow. But it wasn’t going to be. We landed at Taittinger’s champagne house and decided that we should, at the very least, take a tour of their cave cellars. That didn’t disappoint. We bought a couple of bottles for friends, tasted some of our own, and came out a couple of hours later wondering again what to do in that place. 

We managed first class tickets on our TGV

Various available bottle sizes

Clearly, this happens everywhere!

We whiled away some more time, took a late afternoon train back to Paris, went home to change and get set for our evening in Monmartre for the cabaret. 

Reims remains, and will remain, a sore point in our relationship for times to come.

The cabaret venue, La Nouvelle Eve initially looked a bit sketchy, especially the entrance to the halls, but I was comfortable soon after. C wasn’t. Unbelievably, he enjoyed the filler acts more than the actual show. I thought that the beginning was slow and bumpy, but it only got better with time and the closing was superb. It’s a shame photography wasn’t allowed, but I guess it’s good so people can actually enjoy being there.

One did have to visit and click this picture!

The next day of our trip was dedicated to typical, touristy Parisian things. Notre dame, the Louvre, the Seine, crepes, Champs Elysees and the Eiffel Tower. The day was scorching hot at nearly 35 degrees. I hated it that C was making me walk. I felt like shite and behaved like shite too. There was nothing romantic about the trip and we couldn’t believe we were upset with each other on this first, supposedly fancy trip. Of course, it didn’t help that I couldn’t find decent vegetarian food anywhere. Yes, I could have punched someone in the face and come back to London if I could!

But I clicked a few pictures and took breaks every 30 minutes like an old woman. 

And then arrived the evening. My head and my nerves calmed. I could finally begin to see the romanticised side of the city. We decided it was a good time to buy my birthday dress (ala the annual tradition of wearing something new on the birthday). C picked a dress I never would have, but I tried it and loved it. Unsurprisingly, the mood improved. 

Clicking photos of Arc de Triomphe was fun. I was happy. 

We then took a boat tour which was another one of the disappointments of the trip. It wasn’t an open top boat, the commentary was very dry, and there were way too many people around us. Now I was grumpy. 

And then we finally went to the Eiffel Tower. Yes, we had actually saved it till our second night in the city. Don’t ask why. I was over the moon at the sight of the glittering tower. I distinctly remember being excited like a child. The shimmering lights at every hour added a 100 times to my excitement. I think I almost danced. I definitely jumped. It was also a full moon night (or maybe a day short) and the moon sat symmetrically by the tower. I changed lenses on my camera. I had ice cream. I kissed C. I did everything one does when they see the Eiffel Tower for the first time. I didn’t care to go to the top. I just didn’t want to give up the view of the Tower! So I walked back and forth, left and right, just to make sure I didn’t miss the best views of it. We later lay by the river, with the Eiffel towering over us, until all the shops shut down and it was time to take a late train home.   

On our final day in the city, as we typically do, we took it easy. We strolled in any direction we liked. We focused on getting some good food. I did want to see the Statue of Liberty, so we went in its direction. The weather had either improved or I had begun to get used to it but I was definitely more comfortable. I got a drink or two. We got a dessert or three. I chanced upon the Wall of Love. I refused to do a steep walk and C made his peace with it. We were okay. 

A rather awful font for train station names

For the love of breads!

We reached Gare du Nord and figured something was wrong. Trains were delayed. There was no sign of our train. But we had cleared immigration and there was no way of turning back. We sat. We waited. We learned it was because refugees had blocked the tracks in Calais. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. The number of people piling up at the station platforms was increasing with every train that wasn’t showing up for its return. We were almost certain we won’t be able to get back when suddenly there was an announcement. The last few trains of the night were being combined to go back to London and we had a chance there after over four hours of wait. We returned without further delay and Eurostar offered to compensate us by giving us a set of free tickets for a similar journey in the coming months. We were certainly not going back to Paris. Belgium, maybe. 

It took nearly a year before we did. Details to follow. 

A is for Amsterdam

I have decided that an A-Z blogging challenge will help me get back in the rhythm of writing. And so, let’s begin with Amsterdam. 

From our chalk board at home =)

It was on C’s wish list for a while and I was looking forward to it for the windmills and tulips. A plan for the extended Easter weekend (the UK’s only real festival apart from Christmas) meant I could see tulips for real. Spring, after all!

Yellow flowers and sunshine can do this

Over time we have become Airbnb pros and just find it more convenient to stay by ourselves, especially because finding vegetarian food can be a challenge in most part of Europe. Having our own kitchen means we can fix meals for ourselves if we need to and a private apartment/house also means we get to stay away from the sterile, standard world of hotels and get a better feel of local lifestyle. So we booked one for this trip too. It was a cosy studio with a garden by one of the hundreds of canals in the city. 

We left on the afternoon of Friday, 25th from London Heathrow with a lot of time at hand for security given the Brussels attacks the same week and all airports in the city being on alert that travel weekend.

It was a sunny, warm day – the first of its kind in a long time - and I felt funny leaving the city on such a day. Particularly because Amsterdam had rain forecasts. 

It was a short flight to the enormous Schiphol airport in Amsterdam. E-N-O-R-M-O-U-S. With the irony of four immigration counters for those entering the country. Even though C tried to reason it by saying that the airport is largely for transits I could not understand how it could be so random. Hordes of people were literally sweating it out in the unorganised queues to get a stamp on their passports. I have to note at this point how much I feel for India and the criticisms we are used to making every time I see such inefficiencies in other parts of the world (which has been often in my rather short period of travelling in Europe and the Middle East). Some episodes worse than others, but shit happens everywhere and all the time. India is not unique even though its challenges are often more unique than others’. 

Anyway. We took a train from the airport to the city and walked around 20 minutes through the by-lanes before reaching our apartment in Zeeburgerdijk. The hosts had kindly provided information about the surrounding area along with recommendations on places to eat. It was around 2130 then and we decided to go out for a short walk. To our delight, we found an old windmill close to the house (we could literally see it from our backyard) which had a brewery in its yard, along with a warm, hip bar & restaurant next door. We settled there after a short stroll to get some food and drinks. C noticed cute women around (apparently Europe does better than the UK) and I appreciated a cute dog around. Our priorities are pretty clear. 

The next day, the only one with clear skies, was dedicated to Keukenhof. But before heading back to Schiphol to get our bus to Keukenhof, we went to the highly recommended, Netherlands’ first omelettery (I didn’t know that was a thing), Omelegg. We waited about 30 minutes to get in but it was worth the wait. The place had a great menu, warm ambience and the food was good! From there we walked to the Amsterdam Centraal station and took a train to Schiphol. 

It is a busy city. Its roads look very busy because of trams, cycles, buses, cars and people – everyone fighting for a pie of their own. And I feel like the Easter weekend saw many tourists like us as well. 

Schiphol’s parking lot gave a clear sense of the number of visitors. It had hundreds of people queueing up for a bus to Keukenhof. I wasn’t too excited about it but could not be bothered. They had buses leaving every five minutes so the wait wasn’t too long. The 30 minute bus ride also brought more windmill views. :D 

The park was packed – with people and bulbs. A little too commercial for my liking but I was happy to see the colours and click my pictures. We were a few weeks too early to see the fields blooming and missed that sight. Maybe for next time. Maybe for Kashmir.

Blurry happiness!

We came back home to freshen up and go out for Indonesian food which somehow is popular in Amsterdam. But we didn’t have the greatest experience, i.e., I was still hungry after that and ended up eating at McDonald’s. We randomly strolled around the centre of the city. I bought a few souvenirs. A drunk man pushed C. We went to buy a brownie but returned with a muffin which was neither tasty nor had the effect it was meant to have. 

Over the next couple of days we rode trams, we ate waffles (Metropolitan!), we didn’t ride bikes because it was too cold and windy and a bit on the dangerous side. We ate more desserts and the speciality fries which are sold all around the city, looked for more specific souvenirs and walked so much that my pedometer crossed all previous records.

Chocolate madness!

I couldn't resist this one!

That Sunday we started the day with an open boat canal tour of the city. We had a lesson in finding an open top boat for such tours which otherwise can be boring. We found a perfect, small boat with no headsets for standard commentary. Instead we had a local old lady talking us through Amsterdam’s history – how the wealthy came to Amsterdam from all around the world, how places got their names, how they have over 150 nationalities living there, and so on. Most fascinating for me was how the houses in the city had tree trunk foundations which lasted over a hundred years but many are now getting weak and several houses have a tilt. I mean move over leaning tower of Pisa. These houses are serious business. 

TILTED

One other tradition we now have (it started with Kronotrop in Istanbul) is of visiting authentic artisan coffee shops whenever we visit a new city. Amsterdam’s Screaming Beans was on our list of recommendations from friends and it did not let down. Well, I didn’t have coffee. C did. It’s his thing. 

We also found a different brownie shop and made sure we found something that had more power. I had a bit of the brownie and had a short fit of laughter. While it was funny it was also scary because it felt like it took over all my brain cells and drove me into complete hysteria. It was mighty scary. C was unaffected. He claims he slept well because of it.

That same evening we also did a tour of the red light district. C still manages to surprise me at times - this time with a map he managed to find online with 12-13 landmarks of the district. Before we knew it I was navigating and leading our tour group of two. But this is ideally a night time activity (duh). I was very fascinated by the windows which I knew were occupied by women at night and made sure to take C back there after dinner. It was obviously nothing like anything I had ever seen before. And in the spirit of being there I even bought myself a conservative souvenir from a shop. 

This is how it's done

Our final day in the city was relaxed. The weather was confused – extreme winds and some rain were followed by a surprisingly pleasant sunny spell. We did not have much of an agenda except to get a good, filling meal – it happens towards the end of every trip. So we found an Indian restaurant with Pakistani staff and really good food! Koh-i-Noor restaurant was a good find after landing at several closed places across the city. But before that we chanced upon the Coster Diamonds factory for a free tour and a walk through their collection of some fine stones. The other (original) Kohinoor story of theirs wasn’t fun. It never is. But pestering C for diamonds (which I’m not even particularly crazy about) was super fun. *grins*

Central to this trip was Spui, the station we invariantly landed at to access anything we wanted to see. So this post was originally going to be titled, “Chalo Spui”. But then I got more creative. 

The one-hour flight back was delayed by an hour. It reinforced my hatred for airports but then it gave us a chance to discuss our next trip.

2015

I usually do a recap of the year every December. But since I haven’t written much this year, this recap is really going to be about me trying hard to recall the details – big and small – before they fade with memory. 

Since it’s a long list and since the blog post number has been so low this year, I shall break the post into a few parts. 

Here goes the year in review, part I:

PLACES
~ I moved from Abu Dhabi to New Delhi to London

~ Stayed at a super luxury hotel and found it utterly underwhelming

~ Visited a lavender farm that looked and smelled like a dream 

~ Travelled first class 

~ Travelled low cost 

~ Got bumped up to Etihad's business class on my final flight out of Abu Dhabi

~ Got an unexpected five year Schengen visa

~ I visited Berlin 

~ Then I visited Paris

~ And then I went to Portugal

~ Visited a museum of natural history and saw the T.Rex! 

~ Visited the Guggenheim museum

~ Chose not to visit the Louvre 

~ Visited Cambridge

~ Booked tickets to Scotland but couldn’t go

~ Booked two trips for 2016

Part II to follow...

Einer Reise Nach Berlin

Schwarzfahren. German for riding without a ticket. How did I learn this word? My host in Berlin confidently recommended going ‘schwarzfahren’ on my first evening in the city (not validating the day pass I’d just bought) because its tube network does not have any turnstiles and apparently tickets are rarely checked – especially after peak hours. And so I thrillingly ‘rode black’ two stations for one of the cheapest good meals I’ve had ever since I left India. We paid some five odd euros for two large slices of pizza. That’s almost £3.5! I get nothing better than a cold Tesco sandwich for that kind of money. Certainly not a fresh, warm, oozing-with-cheese pizza. That day I realised that London is actually quite expensive. But then so is the UAE because prices are fairly comparable between the two. Or maybe it’s just Berlin which is amazingly affordable. I am told the rent there is also quite incredibly low.

U-bahn, the underground

I always knew that Germany is not one of the English-friendly countries but I never imagined things could be unsettlingly difficult to decode. The first taxi ride in the city - from the airport - lasted about 20 minutes and I did not spot even five words of English anywhere. The driver didn’t speak any English either and within the first 30 seconds we were down to good ol’ hand gesturing  to communicate. 

English! :D

Google was obviously the biggest help for navigating routes but it failed me, dramatically enough, when it stopped at giving S-bahn numbers without telling me which platforms to find my trains at. It doesn’t sound like a big deal – how many platforms would a standard local city station have, you’d ask. I happened to be at Hauptbahnhof, one of the biggest stations I’ve ever seen, the first time that I got lost. It has U-bahn (underground), S-bahn (street level), intercity and inter-country trains running every second. It also has the best veggie McDonald’s burger outside of India but I’ll come back to that later. When I had that burger I was somewhere between trying to miraculously decode German signage and giving up any hope of getting to my destination. The station literally had nothing in English except details of the train that went to the airport (thoughtful). The only other familiar word was Budapest – I spotted it on a train that I definitely didn’t want to take. After about 25-30 minutes of going up and down three levels I finally figured that the only way to get anywhere in the city is to ask a real person. Most of them know ‘a little bit’ of English. It’s usually enough to combine with what Google says about finding something. 

Hauptbahnhof - at the platform it took me forever to find

During one of the walks when I was lost

The other highlight of this language barrier was my interaction with a nurse at a hospital that I was visiting. T had been away for his surgery a little too long. So I went to enquire at the nurses’ station on his side of the floor. Again, little to no English. 

“Urologi?”

“Erm…kidney...kidney procedure”

“Urologi? Friend? Urologi?” (this time with hands gesturing all over the organ system)

Clearly this wasn’t working. We moved straight to finding his name in the system. And after about 5-7 minutes of exchanging confused looks and words incomprehensible for the other, she told me he was still away for his operation. Not the most helpful outcome, but the lady was way more patient and polite than I expected. By Indian AND by London standards.

When I wasn’t at the hospital I was busy checking off tourist-y spots in the city. I think I managed to cover a fair deal even though the afternoon heat was quite draining. The Berlin Wall Memorial was like ghar ki murgi because it was next door to where I was staying. I passed by it every time I stepped out so didn’t care much to spend time there. The East Side Gallery (that’s where I wanted to go from Hauptbahnhof) blew my mind! From a distance it looked like a regular wall with some graffiti. But every mural on this long wall spoke volumes about the skill and thought that must have gone into it. I obviously went crazy with my camera. The river, Spree that passes along the wall was a nice addition to the otherwise ordinary area. T had told me I wouldn’t spend more than 30-45 minutes there, but I ended up being there for nearly two hours and left only because it got a little late in the night. In any case finding the right public transport seemed to take longer than the actual rides.

The next day I started with a walk around Gendarmenmarkt, Franz Friedrichstadtkirche and Konzerthaus Berlin. It’s basically a neoclassical square in central Berlin with a royal (can I use that term to reference things outside the UK?) concert hall along with French and German cathedrals on either side. The historic structures were bombed during World War II but they were rebuilt and stand tall today in all their imposing glory. 

Gendarmenmarkt Square - The first time that I used the panorama feature on my phone 

I also visited what is known to be one of Berlin’s best chocolatiers, Fassbender & Rausch. The store was admittedly mind-boggling. Everything was made of chocolate – from huge landmark buildings to the city’s mascot to a million different flavours of truffles and pralines and chocolate bars – it was crazy! It felt like a got a sugar rush just by looking at all the chocolate. I got a pack of 12 different chocolates for home but I have to say they were nothing better than ordinary. Each flavour, each chocolate let me down. Gah.

THIS IS CHOCOLATE! :O

And this too!

After a long pit stop for food, drinks and hope for the sun to take it easy, I started towards the Brandenburg Gate and the German parliament building, Reichstag. The Reichstag was impressive. Well, I do have a weakness for perfectly symmetrical buildings and this one didn’t fail to amaze either.

Saw that chocolate figure on top? Here's the real one in selfie mode. Perils of travelling alone. 

When Fanta was a different orange!

The other thing that was extremely fascinating was the Ampelmann. Initially I thought it was just me spotting the cuteness in the city’s pedestrian stop lights. But soon I figured that it has a long history from before the integration of East and West Germany. They have dedicated Ampelmann stores with all kinds of merchandise that you can imagine. I didn’t particularly like anything to buy at that point, but in retrospect, I want an Ampelmann souvenir. Just look at it! How often do you see any character in such mundane things?

I didn’t spend much time in Berlin but I definitely think the city has a lot of character. It’s not one of those cities that I can imagine falling instantly in love with; everything about it grew on me gradually. The streets, the people, the music, the history – all very subtle, but charming nonetheless. I am sure it’s a completely different experience for someone who knows the language, but for a couple of days one can make do with getting lost and exploring Berlin at leisure.

Oh, and the city has a mascot which reflects nothing of its history or culture. Or maybe it does. The Berlin Bear is all over the city in various forms and colours. Here's one in all its chocolatey glory!

PS: Berlin’s city airport, Tegel is so small and so well located that I can never imagine anyone missing a flight from there. Hurry up and experience it before they close it down for the new one that’s on its way.