Paris - Day 1

Was pretty busy over the week and so cudn't spend time writing the travelogue. Hmmm.. I had stopped the previous one at getting off the bus. From the coach station we went to Gallieni station and took the underground to St Lazare and changed train to Volontaires.

8:00 I came out of the underground and got my first view of Eiffel.
The first impression of Eiffel leaving aside the fact that I was looking at something which lot of ppl would want to see atleast once was a little disappointing. A rust coloured skeletal structure didn’t impress me that much. The hostel was pretty close to the station. The check in time was 5 PM. So we just kept the luggage in a room and freshened up. I had brilliantly forgotten to take the Disneyland tickets. Thankfully the receptionist was sweet and offered to take the print out for us.



9:30 Had a light breakfast of a few biscuits, juice, chocolate muffins and some Upma that Sangeetha had got, we left for Disney. Took a train from Volontaires. Changed at Montparnasse Bienvenue to Le Halles and from there to Disney land. We seriously couldn’t get the way they pronounce the places... We tried a lot and then started to call it the why we thot sounded good to us.

10.45 reached Disney. Thankfully we had taken tickets online. So we were able to bypass a one hour queue. We were welcomed by a train full of Disney characters... It was like the temple chariot going- Ppl standing on both sides of the road watching it go on tram tracks and lots of ppl following it religiously arnd. Then we went for various rides. The most sought after rides had a system called east pass where you can collect a pass which will have your entry time. This way we can save our time visiting other things we'll have to wait atleast 35-45 min if don't get a fast pass. The three rides that were really good were big thunder mountain, Indiana jones and temple of peril and Space Mountain: mission 2. All three were kinda roller coaster rides. It was like a old mine train riding thru a mine. The Indiana jones one a little more interesting with a 360 degree loop too.

My MBlog ends here. Didn’t have much time after this to type it down on mobile. So hence forth it’ll be from my memory which most of you know is pretty bad. Anyway lemme try my best.

The best one was unarguably the space mountain stuff. It started with a sooper fast rocket launch like take off and followed it with crazy loops at very high speeds. We were surrounded by darkness and soon we were flying thru moons, planets, stars and galaxies. Coz of the darkness arnd and the speed in which we were going, we cud hardly feel if we were going straight up or going down or are upside down... ufff it was jus too good... I and Mukul did Indiana jones and Space Mountain twice. In the mean time we also went to the famous trade mark Disney castle which is actually the castle of the sleeping beauty, just that we were not able to find her anywhere in the castle. I bought a couple of memorabilia in the shops there. We also took some photos with disney characters.

We were very hungry having had nothing since the light morning breakfast other than a couple of chips packet shared and an apple. And there wasn’t anything that looked filling in the stalls too. So I took hot dog for the first time in my life. It was ok. May not take it again unless I’m in the same situation with nothing else to eat.

After that we went to the “The legend of Lion King” show. It was a dance drama kinda stuff and portrays what happens to Simba after the death of Mufasa. Here is the link abt the movie for those unfortunate souls who had missed it. It was a pretty good one. The on stage spl effects were too good.

Then we went to the Disney studios only to realise we hadn’t got the tickets for it. I had booked the tickets in a hurry that day and forgot to select the correct ticket. L. So we went to the Disney village nearby which had all restaurants, shops and theatre. Did some window shopping and then started back.

We had lots of time left in the day. So we decided to do some night sight seeing. We went to the Opera thinking abt the Opera in Sydney.It turned out to be a huge old styled building with huge pillas and intricate statues placed all arnd it. I know it sounds a crude way of putting it but that’s how it is.

Then we decided to go to Eiffel tower area. We took the bus towards Eiffel and it took a route via the Road leading to Arc de Triumphe. It was an amazing sight, Broad road, lit up on both, filled with traffic leading to a Majestic structure in the middle of the largest junction I’ve ever seen (12 roads converging onto the monument). We put Eiffel on hold and got down at the next stop and started walking towards it. Half way thru we started feeling a bit hungry and we cud see only a couple of restaurants serving Pizza and stuff. We thot we wouldn’t get any other choice and went in and ordered for 2 Pizzas for 3 of us. Sangeetha wasn’t hungry. And the waitress was like, “Sorry sir you have to order atleast 4 meals. Atleast salads. (Seeing the size of Pizzas, we had initially thot we’ll take just one Pizza but later thot it’ll be too much for four of us to go and order 1 Pizza. So we had asked for 2). The plain green salads were only about 6 Euros and none of us were interested in eating it. She wudn’t even let us go without ordering anything. Finally she agreed to give us 2 Pizzas and a bottle of water costing another 6 Euros. After half an hour of struggle with the Pizzas, we came out of the restaurant and I was saying how we will feel if we get to see a McD close by. And guess what there wasn’t just 1 but 2 McDs within a space of 100 mts. And to further rub salt, there was one more Mc D in the adjacent road...

Then went near the Arc De Triumphe and were discussing the similarity of it with our own India Gate in Delhi.Only difference being They don’t let you go on top of the India Gate and has a lot of green open spaces arnd it while here you can go to the top (for a price of course) and it’s in the middle of a concrete jungle with a few trees thrown into.



By then we were all pretty tired and we took the underground from there (Took us 20 mins to find the entry to the underground which was just across the road from where we started our search). Reached the hostel, went into the room and opened the window and Voila!!!!!!!!!
There was the Eiffel tower right in front of us all lit up with brilliant orange lights and the next instant it started glittering with hundreds of white flashes like a group of photographers at a red carpet. It was a mesmerizing sight. I later came to know that those glittering lights are on every hour for five minutes post sunset.

It was a wonderful and memorable day... Paris is a totally different one at night and i was eager to see what else it has to offer... see you on Day 2....