Emirates is a great airline to fly. Some perks that I most enjoyed: hot, damp towels at the beginning of every flight; 600+ movies to choose from in individual touch-screen entertainment systems; airline food that tastes like real food; and REAL-TIME VIDEO feeds of the journey! Seriously, one of the coolest things I've experienced about the actual act of traveling. All four of the planes I was on (all Boeing 777's) had two cameras: one at the nose, and one somewhere along the bottom of the plane. Under the information section of the entertainment systems, in addition to the digital maps tracing the routes and all the stats about temperature, distance, time, speed, etc., there was the option to view either the forward or the downward cameras. So I got to see deserts, snow-capped mountains, seas, and cities from a higher-than-birds-eye view. Well, I didn't see anything on the way back because it was all dark, and most of Europe was really cloudy on the way, but I had a lovely aerial view of the Middle East. It was surreal, and completely awesome. Sometimes technology is pretty amazing.
Dubai is the largest, sparkliest airport I've ever been in. Granted, I've only been in a minuscule percentage of the world's airports, but every inside surface was literally shining, and the pavement that I saw outside (runways, sidewalks, etc.) had zero visible dirt. Crazy. Walking from my arrival gate to my departure gate, I refused all the glitzy duty-free shops, the luxury car raffle, and the $5,000,000 raffle. I stood in awe for a moment at the 3-story, 30-40-yard long wall waterfall with four glass elevators zooming up and down side by side in front of it. I then continued on my way, distracted by the shiny Rolex clocks sticking out of the wall every 20 yards or so, and I laughed at the tiny men in white suits, goggles, and masks suspended very high in the air with the terrible job of cleaning the arched wall of windows. There was a surprising lack of people in the airport, but perhaps that's because of how gargantuan it is. I'm pretty sure all of Logan Airport and then some could fit just inside the part of Terminal 3 that I walked through. (On my return trip, I timed how long it took me to walk from the gate where I arrived to my departure gate: 25 minutes.)
I'll skip over the boring flight from Dubai to Paris and the inexplicably long train ride from CDG to the center of Paris. On Friday, the weather was actually quite pleasant, though a bit brisk, so we decided to walk. A lot. We stayed at a hostel in the Bastille district, so after breakfast (bad coffee, French bread, and Nutella that Kevin brought), we wandered out in the direction of the Notre Dame. We walked to Notre Dame, peered around inside, and continued on along the river towards the other touristy things. Since it was a nice day, we admired the museums from the outside. We paused for a little while at the garden at Tuileries, then made our way through the little side streets around the Eiffel Tower. After much standing in line and bundling up against the wind and cold, we found ourselves at the top! The view was amazing. One of the things that struck me was how even Paris is; nearly all of the buildings are roughly the same height and almost exclusively some brand of cream/off-white, so we looked out on a vast sea of grayness punctuated by the green of parks just awakening to spring. It was very pretty, a view made all the more dramatic by the giant clouds overhead.
When we had become thoroughly chilled and windswept, we left the Eiffel Tower and decided to continue walking to the Arc de Triomphe. We spent some time trying to figure out if it was, in fact, a death wish to try crossing about six lanes of traffic in the roundabout to get to the actual monument. Once we finally consulted the guidebook, we found the underground tunnel that is there to prevent that sort of dangerous decision, and we sat and admired the pretty sculptures and beautiful day. (I still think we should have just crossed the road through a break in the traffic, but that's the Delhiite in me talking. I don't think the French would understand this Indian habit of just walking out into extremely busy streets and expecting traffic to stop for you.) Having driven by India Gate several times a week since I've been in Delhi, I can see how people draw similarities. It's interesting to see such similar structures in completely different contexts in different parts of the world. I think I like the simplicity of India Gate better, though the decorative nature of the Arc de Triomphe definitely fits in with its surroundings.
Next, we walked down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, contemplated shopping for luxury cars, and found a bench to sit on and flowers to look at instead. Turns out that Champs-Élysées is not a good place to shop if you're on a budget. (Please note that we did actually know this beforehand. We just felt that since we were there, we should see what all the fuss was about. It's not very exciting.) While we were sitting, a random French gentleman inquired of the whereabouts of the metro station, which we sadly did not know; Kevin told him we didn't speak French and didn't know where the metro station was anyway, and the man went on his way. A little while later, we felt his pain; the metro station that seemed on the map was a matter of meters from where we stood appeared to have been protected by an invisibility charm. After some searching, we found it and returned to the hostel for a nap before dinner. Dinner was cheap and delicious, and we had a quiet evening, going to bed early because I was busy being jet-lagged and no fun. Looking back at the map, however, I feel I had a perfectly legitimate reason to be tired; we covered quite a bit of ground that day.
On Saturday, we took the train out to Versailles. We were both still tired, so in between the train station and the Château, we stopped for coffee. I paid 4 euros for a cappuccino, which was delicious and completely overpriced. I went back to cheaper-but-still-overpriced espresso after that. Walking up to the Château de Versailles was a little mind-boggling; seeing gold-leaf on everything inside and out was a bit overwhelming. Inside was a further display of opulence and luxury for the sake of luxury. Colorful, regal, and utterly impractical. It was fun to walk through, but I could never imagine someone actually living in a place like that. Although I'm sure some smashing parties were thrown in the Hall of Mirrors.
It was pouring rain when we were ready to leave Versailles and continued to rain when we got back to Paris, so we spent the rest of the afternoon in the Musée d'Orsay looking at famous European art. I found my favorite Monet painting ("Houses of Parliament, Sun Breaking Through the Fog"), which was very cool. I wrote a poem based on it during my freshman year in high school that won an award, so it brought back memories. It was nice to see the original painting in person. It's amazing how much of a difference that makes.
We grabbed some food on our way back to the hostel and again needed an early-evening nap, but we ventured out into the night after that. Stopped for some delicious Nutella crepes on our way to the most bizarre night club I've been to possibly ever. Lace curtains, big oak tavern tables, religious statues, and odd postcards don't even begin to explain. The music got progressively more eclectic (and worse) as the evening went on, but the place had a line down the alley and out to street, and it was overflowing with dancing Europeans the whole time we were there. It was a lot of fun, although I half-expected to hear bad Bollywood songs blasting out of the speakers every time the song changed. :) Since it was no longer raining when we were ready to go home and the metros had stopped running, we walked the couple miles back to the hostel and crashed.
Due to daylight savings time, which I had noted before I left but promptly forgot about upon my arrival in France, we missed free coffee on Sunday morning at the hostel, so that was first on our to-do list after we had eaten and showered. After we were properly caffeinated, we walked a few blocks down to the Sunday street market. I adore street markets of any variety, and I was not disappointed. I was "ooh-la-la"-ed by what I believe to be an Italian produce vendor (since he said, "Buon' giorno!" right before "Ooh, la la!"), which made me giggle. We bought delicious fresh bread made from every grain known to mankind and some awesome Camembert cheese, which was a mid-morning snack (and lunch, and an afternoon snack...). To top it off, we got a scrumptious chocolate tort. There were Spanish boys singing a cappella, abandoning their songs midway to burst out into laughter, and there were old ladies selling daffodils, and there were cute puppies. There was stencil-graffiti on the sidewalk that said "NAMASTE" so I took a picture, and we sort of wandered the aisles gazing at the wide variety of goods available (including one lonely crab, which startlingly turned out to be alive, though just barely, we think).
When we finished with the market, we went to the Louvre Museum. Though we had walked by it on Friday during our Paris-by-foot exploration and commented on how huge it looked, it wasn't until we were inside the thing that we fully realized how HUGE it is. Large portions of it were closed, and we walked through many, many galleries, but we still saw only a tiny portion. I didn't realize how overprotective they are of the Mona Lisa; it's in a glass case on a wall by itself, with two layers of barriers arcing around it. You can't get closer than about fifteen feet, and there were at least three museum workers/guards (not really sure what they were, but they were official-looking) keeping an eye on the crowd. So we saw it, took pictures of us with the painting in the background, then sought a less crowded area.
After a few hours we decided we were completely visually overstimulated and incapable of properly appreciating any more art, so we sat outside at the edge of a fountain, ate some more delicious bread and cheese, and planned our next move. That wound up being a journey out to Montmartre, climbing up the hill to the Sacre Cœur, and hanging out for a while. It turned into an absolutely beautiful and calm afternoon, so when we were done exploring the church and watching the street performers, we found ourselves a bench on a quieter side of the hill and relaxed for a while.
That evening, we went back to the Eiffel Tower to see it all lit up for nighttime. We came approached it through the Parc du Champs de Mars, which also contains the Wall for Peace monument. It was so pretty. And so cold. But so pretty.
Monday morning was just breakfast and packing, then off to the train station, and I continued on to the airport. My return trip was less fun than the journey there: I woke up Monday morning with a cold (that's what I get for going from 95˚ and dry to 45˚ and rain and wind), and I couldn't find any place in the airport to buy medicine. I spent my last 10 euros on a travel pillow (which was a ridiculous price! but I was desperate), and that allowed me to sleep some on the plane to Dubai, but the descent into Dubai was absolutely terrible. I was unable to pop my ears to equalize the pressure, so I had a pretty terrible headache the whole 40-minute descent, and my nose was running like crazy. It was after 12:30 a.m. local time when I finally made it across the airport to my gate, and I tried to nap in the uncomfortable chairs by the gate, but it was not at all a restful sleep. Once we finally boarded the plane (I had a 4-hour layover), the pilot announced that due to the weather, we weren't allowed to take off. So we were stuck on the plane for more than a half hour before we pulled back from the gate, and then when we approached Delhi, I noticed that we were circling. We made a giant loop around Delhi, about a 30-mile radius, which set us back an additional half-hour behind schedule. When I finally made it through immigration and collected my suitcase, I went to the pre-paid taxi stand, which is supposed to be the surest way to get from the airport to anywhere in Delhi. It wasn't. Though the taxi driver acted like he knew exactly where he was going, and I gave him a landmark in addition to the name of my neighborhood, I somehow found myself on Neeti Marg in Moti Bagh, not at all near Neeti Bagh. I did, however, find out that Delhi has a national rose garden, a railway museum, and several lovely hospitals. And more traffic circles. Always more traffic circles. Anyway, after asking an ice-cream wallah, a random pedestrian, and an auto-wallah, my taxi driver (who spoke no English) finally received directions that he understood, and I eventually made it back to the residence. At which time I promptly took a nap. It was a very long and exhausting journey home, but worth every second of frustration and discomfort.
I loved Paris. I loved getting to see my boyfriend. I loved traveling more and seeing something new and exciting. I loved that I could successfully eavesdrop on German conversations at breakfast in the hostel, and I loved being able to photograph more things.
I had no classes yesterday, so I spent the day doing laundry and catching up on emails and sleep. I feel better today - more rested, and less sick, which is good. Everyone else in the house except one other girl is still traveling, so it's nice and quiet here, which I'm enjoying. My weekend plans consist of actual schoolwork (crazy, right?), writing papers and doing lots of microeconomics reading and remembering all that Hindi that got lost with hearing French and German for four days.
Congratulations if you made it all the way to this point; I know I've been putting up lengthy posts lately. It's hard to be concise and detailed at the same time, and I already feel like I'm leaving so much out. Hopefully between these stories and the pictures I've put up, you get a good idea of what I'm experiencing. I need to tell these stories now before I forget them all or just have too many to tell. :)
Now that I've recorded all the observations, I'll try to get some thoughts up next time.
Until then, namaste, beautiful people.
P.S. The date on the post is correct. I did, indeed, begin writing it on March 31st, and it took me a full 48 hours to find the energy to complete it. Blogging's hard. :)
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