Happiness

Vaguely remember a TED talk where the author talks about Happiness being in Love in a Paris Cafe while drinking coffee or some such thing..

The three women in the house have been in love with the concept of being in Paris for a long time. That said they were all way too excited and I was worried that there is no way they can end the day happy, and I was almost right!

The previous post in this series is here...

We went from the Louvre for a short walk to the Cruise boat stop. It was a large boat.. must have had a few hundred people on it. The ride was a loop and we had an all day pass as part of the package. The group went on the boat and got off at the Eiffel tower.

There was a long line at the security checkpoint that cost us dearly in time. There was no bypassing that. After we got through, the guide quickly took us to the first level of the tower, we learned a few things about the place (like how the names of famous French scientists was written along the rim of the tower) and our pre ordered vegetarian option for lunch was served in the restaurant at the first level of the tower.

We had great views (no good photographs unfortunately as the windows were bright and the insides were dark) and the lunch was excellent. 

That is the happiest I have seen this kid in recent times and this is a happy go lucky kid we are talking about!

We were then told that our tickets were not for the elevator to the 2nd level landing, but it was 500 steps? one way and if we could run up and down and make it back in 30 minutes we won't miss the group on its way out. 

San decided to sit this one out and the girls and me ran up the steps as fast as we could. After a heavy lunch it seemed to be an ordeal but we did it and were not disappointed. The views were much better from the 2nd landing and we took some photos...

got a lot of Pano shots of Paris from the 2nd level..

then we ran back down in time to take the elevator to the ground. 

The girls actually had enough energy to run all the way to the ground floor from the first level. We still had to wait another 20 minutes for the group to gather after we reached the ground.  There is always the one family within the group that has to be 10 minutes late.. was telling myself "next time I want to be that family!" and realized it was not in our nature to be that family. 

We spent the 20 minutes wandering through the gift shop on one of the legs of the tower, bought a nice miniature replica of the Eiffel tower for 25 Euro, walked out of the tower and saw a bunch of African immigrants selling the same thing without the box for 8 Euro, smiled at how the kids were saying "but the one we got is in a box and is better quality Appa!"  and went back to the boat stop. Today was not the day to have any conversation about objects, value, economics, etc. etc. Today was their day.. 

Slide shows of the pictures from our Eiffel Tower Visit..

It was time to see the famous Notre Dame cathedral!

So far it was so good. The girls were on cloud 9 after this experience and I wished to freeze those moments for a long time..

The wait was over

If there was one place that came to the top of the list on the Europe tour, it was Paris. The kids have been wanting to go see the Eiffel Tower and see Paris with dreamy eyes for at least a few years now. Many of their classmates have visited Paris over the years and they were itching to go.. 

It was surprising that they allowed us to start the Europe tour in a place other than Paris and waited till day 9 of the trip to go see the sights there.

The previous post on this series is here...

Day 9 came and we were on an all day tour of Paris which started with two hours at the Louvre. The tour covered three famous ladies including the Mona Lisa and three hallways and galleries.  The Louvre being huge, this was like a trailer for a movie.. a  two hour trailer! 

The Louvre was amazing. The entryways, the grand staircase below the glass pyramid, the hallways, the water fountains! (yes, they were a contrast to the Palace of Versailles where one could easily faint of dehydration), and the amazing art work were a treat. 

We also were fortunate to have a great tour guide for the day. This lady knew what she was talking about and paced things resaonably well.

We saw the Mona Lisa and took a selfie. There was a huge crowd just to get to take a selfie.. We did the "engaththu kaararum kutcherikku ponar" shot with the Mona Lisa.. I never realized the actual painting size was so small!! Once the guide told me that this was different from previous portrait styles in the day, I humbly bowed and moved on..

I was amazed by some of the art that I did not know about before.. the paintings were amazing as were the sculptures.. 

This one piece with the sunlight on the marble made the whole thing surreal.. how a person could sculpt something with marble like this is beyond me.. truly amazing.

The rest of the art looked vaguely repetitive because we had seen them at the Vatican or Uffizi or Vechchio museums or we had just seen the same stuff at the Versailles palace the previous day.

Here are slide shows from the Louvre Visit..

We were rushed to see as much as possible in two hours and were happy to be rushed. We absorbed what we could, told ourselves that someday we should just do a one week tour of the Louvre and walked out with the rest of the group.

It was time to go on a boat trip on the Sienne to see the Eiffel tower! 

The video that captured the entire days trip!

The video has the entire day 9.. will be breaking the other places we visited as separate posts..

It was a packed day!

When money is no object

We spent Day 8 of the Europe trip visiting the palace of Versailles. The previous post on this series is here..

It was a half day package tour with the driver of a minivan picking us up right outside our Air B&B and driving to Versailles. But the tour did not start till 10:30 in the monring. So we had to eat a heavy breakfast and go. We were to leave Versailles at 5PM and it would be close to 6:30 PM before we would make it back. 

Boo had mentioned that Saravana Bhavan was close to the train station. We checked on google maps and found that it was a 12 minute walk from our place. So off we went and were not disappointed. 

The Saravana Bhavan in Paris is really good. Way better than any of the other ones we have eaten at. By the time we walked back to our hotel, it was time to start. The van for our tour was ready. It was just the four of us and another family of 3 from Riverside. An guy who was much older than me who had a kid same age as Jr. Apparently he had money in Semiconductor hardware and had retired. He was giving me advice on how to follow in his footsteps and I was hoping for some nugget of wisdom and eventually realized that lady luck has to be on your side. 

Anyways, lets get back to Versailles. We went past the Louis Vutton building, Neiully s/ Siene (which appears repeatedly in the Jason Bourne movies) and went along the river and after an hour or more were at Versailles. The approach to the Palace said it all. It was a very hot day in that area and based on the crowds it was going to be a crazy day! and it was...

The driver told us that he will introduce us to our guide and be gone. He would leave exactly at 5 from the same place. We asked him if we would recommend any place to eat and he told us about this crepe place outside the palace. We made a mental note and went with a larger group of 34 people..

The palace is the worst when it comes to front entrace security and crowd control. There were at least a dozen tourguides with their groups all fighting to get in. They had time slots to enter and apparently the entire thing was off by one hour because of delays. Someone fainted because of dehydration in the heat. A Chinese tourguide picked a fight with the security and our tourguide was advising us to stay calm or we would never get in..There was no respite from the sun and we were out there for an hour almost. Finally we got in. 

The entrance to this place is grand as were all the art works and the corridors. Looks like the young king had all the money to dispose of and spared no effort to make this a grand palace. We saw a repeat of a lot of statutes we had already seen at the various museums in Italy and turns out he tired to import the same artists to build him the palace and was not so successful because of his temper tantrums. Our tour guide was annoying and our headsets had so much static that it made our head hurt. So we pretty much started wandering around with the group and just observing. We could get the history later..

We finished through the castle and went into a grand courtyard. This was beautiful as was the garden. 

This garden is huge with some amazing fountains and sculptures. We walked to the garden when we realized there was no water and there were no water fountains inside the Palace. There was water to be bought and ice cream to be had on the other side of the garden if we walked a mile. We walked as fast as we could and had some amazing ice cream and got water bottles. Now that we were ready to walk again, we wandered around the gardens with smiles on our faces.

They should have drinking water in a place like this. Even if they are trying to make money for water, they could at least make it available! we saw so many older people and kids suffering. It was a mixed bag, this Palace trip. A few umbrellas, some occasional shade and some water would have made all the difference. Here are three slide shows of photos from the Palace and gardens. 

After we made it out of the palace, we hit the crepe place. The road outside was much cooler thanks to all the trees that lined the road.

We took pictures while the crepes were being made..

and then had some crepes!

Then we headed back to Paris.

The kids wanted to eat something in the room. So San and me went back to Saravana Bhavan, had our fill and got some stuff for the kids to eat. 

It was an early to bed day because the next day was a tour from 7 to 7 with a hectic schedule.

Paris by night was interesting. We learned that the apartment building we were in was built in 1869! There was a lot of noise within and outside the building.

Good thing we were exhausted and were able to sleep right away!

The palace had great panoramic views.. 

and a video that captures our day in Versailles!

on to Day 9...