Am writing this blog to ward off the fear that I might be running out of substantive topics to blog about (Yes. I do not like to write about how I spilt coffee on my desk and how I cleaned it using toilet paper, and denigrate my writing). I shudder at that very thought. Perhaps, it is also because that some of my friends urged me to blog more too often. Finally, I decided to blog about another incident that was quite unsettling, but was also somewhat a fun experience, in retrospect.

About a couple of years back, I was in a European city called Eindhoven on business visit, along with a few other colleagues. Usually during weekends we didn’t have much to do; and, a boring place that Eindhoven is, we used to plan trips to different places in Europe. For one such weekend, three of us (me, KM and SK) planned for a trip to Paris! Hurray!!!

I had been to Paris before this. And, I like it soooooooooooo much that I had no second thoughts, when asked about the weekend trip. Moreover, I had an unfinished job to take care of! Believe me, it is such a romantic place - it deserves a dedicated write-up. I promise to resist my urge to digress from the topic or make this article a picturesque travelogue. Just to present a more vivid description I have included some photographs, wherever the actual scene defies my vocabulary!

According to the plan, we would leave Eindhoven on Friday night and reach Paris on Saturday morning, spend two days and one night there (Wow!!), and start our return journey on Sunday night. Yeah! we had to go back to office on Monday :-(.

We reached Paris very early on Saturday morning – about 6 am, I guess. Just as we climbed out of the underground metro station, we had two surprises - Least did we expect that we would be standing in front of the majestic Opera House; and, more importantly, a very dull and drizzling weather greeted us, which dampened our spirits. But, not for long, as the sun broke out pretty soon.

As it was my second trip to Paris, I knew some places and how to go about – I was playing ‘The Navigator’. We walked towards the city centre (La Concorde, as it is called), spent sometime clicking away with our cameras. I could not resist the urge to take them to the Esplanade des Invalides, a beautiful ancient building. There are huge sprawling gardens on either side of a long street that led to this structure. I just love it!!!



My colleagues started pestering me to take them to the Eiffel tower. Fearing for my life, I complied. Once we were there, we went gung-ho about the wonder. We could not hold ourselves from trying various positions on the lawn in front of the tower. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click………… After much persuasion from my side, they agreed to move ahead, but only when I promised that we will come back in the evening to see the tower, glittering in all its splendor.

Thanks to fatigue, we got a good sleep. Come next day, we got up early, gobbled our breakfast (Well, there’s a story about the lodge where we were put up. But, that’s for another time). Fully cognizant that we could not complete seeing Louvre museum in a single day, we ventured into it. We spent about half day at this very popular museum budgeting our time to check out a seemingly innumerable collection. At the end of it, we could barely stand.

Enthusiasm prevailed over fatigue - I managed to convince these guys to go and visit Chateau de Versailles palace! Located outside of the city, it is a small town by itself. Such a majestic palace, surrounded by serene, lengthy and lush green lawns that stretched to almost as far as one can see. It was worth the trip!

Needless to say, we were tired. But, I was still hungry. We were all happy that we completed the trip to the palace, with almost the whole of Sunday evening to spare. Nothing was in our way; the whole plan went like clockwork, without a glitch. Well, only until now.

Fate has its own plans for us. To snub our arrogance, all the planets aligned themselves to conspire against us. Things started to fall apart when we were hell bent to have dinner at an Indian restaurant. We went too far into suburban Paris. And our effort did pay off - we found a few of them, and we relished a Masala Dosa(a South Indian dish) in a Pondicherry restaurant.

By then, we had about half an hour to reach the bus station and begin our trip back – just about sufficient. Then, I got a crazy idea – I insisted that we stop over at the Arc de Triumph, as we missed out on that one before. I am surprised to this day that they agreed to my crazy idea, and we went to Arc de Triumph. Again, after a few clicks, we rushed back to the place where we were to alight the bus, only to discover that the bus had already left!!

Here we were, stranded in an alien city, late in the night. We just missed our trip back to our temporary home (which happens to be another alien city). All we were left with was anxiety, and a few hundred bucks. My colleagues were furious. I had played a major role in this fiasco. It was a very mature group - after a modest spat, we were back to normalcy, thinking about few options that were open to us. I felt miserable with what I had done.

There was little confusion – we had to take the next available bus / train to Eindhoven. We wandered around the bus station, inquired about the bus timings. To our misfortune, there was none until next morning. We hoped that we can catch a train and rushed to the railway station. But, the story was no different. Now, again there was no confusion, as we had only one option – take the train available early next morning; but, it implied that we had to spend another night in Paris.

So, the next problem was to find an accommodation for that night. We considered various options – even to stay put at the railway station itself, which we learnt not possible as the authorities would not allow such a thing. We wandered around deserted streets, narrow and shady by-lanes of suburban Paris, late in the night. We were belittled – we got a somewhat mild taste of urchin lifestyle.

“Kahaan se aaye ho” (Or, something to that effect), asked an unfamiliar voice, observing our plight. We preferred to ignore him, but he persisted. He followed us for quite sometime, until we gave up and responded. We soon discovered that he was a Pakistani! And, he claimed he was in a similar situation. “Let us go to the bar, and spend the night drinking”, he proposed.

We told him that we want a place to spend our night, sleeping; and that we had a train to catch early next morning. I do not exactly remember what he said. But, it was quite some effort for us to get rid of him. Finally, we managed to find a hotel room. Huh!


Next morning, we rushed to the railway station just as we got up, shelled out about 300 odd euros to buy 3 tickets on Thalys (France’s equivalent of a super fast bullet train), hoping that we could get back to Netherlands, and catch another train to Eindhoven, and then somehow manage to reach office almost on time, say 9:30 am or so. So, that was the plan.

The train started at 6:30 am, I guess. To add to our woes, after a short while, a technical snag showed up from nowhere, and the train got delayed by a couple of hours. Again, our plan fell apart. We shifted to another train, and finally set out on our last leg of the journey. We did reach Eindhoven sometime about noon, and rushed to office. Yeah, I probably stinked that day!