Notre Dame de Paris

The silhouette of Notre Dame in the setting sun

A single post on Paris (my first post on Paris) does not do justice to this lovely city. I found a video which we had shot in the summer of 2004. That had been our first visit to Europe. We had taken a tour from Cox and Kings. It covered Italy, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Holland and England. We had taken great pains at that time to shoot videos, to show it to the family back home. We had fallen in love with Paris during that trip.
The advantage of going on a guided tour was that we were provided with the services of a qualified guide, at all the places. We had a nice guide in Paris. She gave us insight into the lives of the parisians. I particularly loved the Cathedral of Notre Dame. It has innumerable stories attached to it. This video shows Cathedral Notre Dame from inside also.

The Notre dame de Paris ('Our Lady of Paris' in French), also known as the Notre Dame Cathedral, is a Gothic, Roman Catholic Cathedral on the eastern half of the Île de la Cité in the fourth arrondissement of Paris, France.
Besides the cathedral there is the Cathedral tower visit The Notre-Dame tower visit is a trip through all of the upper parts of the western façade, dating from the 13th century, where visitors can contemplate the gargoyles and chimera built by Viollet-le-Duc in the 19th century and the 17th century Emmanuel Bell. 387 steps (there isn’t an elevator) to the top of the South Tower. It’s best to be in good shape !

Crypt of Notre Dame de Paris

Under the square in front of Notre Dame de Paris is one of the largest archaeological crypts in all of Europe. Before the 1860s, the area in front of the Cathedral of Notre Dame was filled with buildings, some dating to the middle ages. When the buildings were torn down remnants of foundations and artifacts dating back to pre-Roman times were discovered. This area on the banks of the Seine has seen human habitation since the early Paleolithic Period, some 500,000 years ago.

If you like this post you will also like Paris - I love this city

Problems with Indian credit cards while traveling esp. in Paris.

Special chip missing in Indian credit cards

While boarding from Paris' Gare du nord we almost missed our Thalys train to Brussels because of our credit cards not being accepted by the ticketing machine. During international travel we usually ensure that we reach the airport or railway station well before time.

Gare du nord, Paris but this is a photo while arriving via the Eurostar from London

But somehow we got delayed the day we were leaving Paris and barely managed to reach the station about half an hour before the train was scheduled to leave. At the station in Paris one usually does not come to know the platform at which the train would be arriving till the very last. So the kids and all our luggage was near the ticketing windows and we had to walk a bit to reach our train and the reserved compartment. We had bought our tickets in India through the net and now we just had to retrieve our tickets from the machine. We tried to get our tickets from the machine without any luck and we panicked as there was very little time left and we were carrying loads of luggage.

Meanwhile Anupam, our friend had already joined a queue at the ticket window as he had lost his wallet with credit cards to a pickpocket in a parisian metro!! Yes a man had taken advantage of Anupam as he was traveling with family, a baby and a stroller and was a tourist - yes this also happens in Paris  and we thought that rogues were mainly confined to Italy!. The story goes like this  - As Anupam with family was entering the metro station his paris visite card got folded in his pocket and the machine would not accept it and would not allow him to enter.

This particular man helped Anupam with his card and the stroller and all. He walked with them till inside the train. Now most Paris metro trains open from one side only. At this particular station the doors on both the sides were open. At the last minute the man picked his pocket and ran out from the other side. Meanwhile Anupam came to know immediately he got his family out fast and followed the man. But he lost him in the crowd after a while. It was a planned and targeted pickpocketing.
Coming back to the original story, Anupam joined the queue immediately as we entered the station and so he got his tickets just in time. Meanwhile we tried at the machine and lost precious time. Then we joined a queue and were literally going berserk at the slow pace with which it was moving. It seemed that no one was in a hurry except for us. The clerk would exchange pleasantries with each person first. We were literally jumping up and down with frustration at the etiquettes which the parisians were observing and we were wishing that alas they would behave like Indians. (Do Indians need lessons in etiquettes?) There was no provision for providing tickets to people whose trains were leaving first. We would have stood on the station and watched our train going by.  But it was not to be so and we managed to get tickets in the nick of time. With our friends help we got our luggage and children near the train and literally threw our luggage in the train and got in.

We could not get our tickets from the machine because our cards, which rely on magnetic-stripe technology for transactions, lacked an embedded microprocessor chip, which stores and processes data and is now commonly used in Europe. Such chip-based cards — commonly referred to as chip-and-PIN cards because users punch in a personal identification number instead of signing for the purchase — offer an extra layer of protection against the theft of cardholder data and counterfeiting, and they are designed to replace magnetic stripe technology and signature payments.

The chip-and-PIN technology usually isn’t much of an issue when making purchases at a store, or paying for a meal in a restaurant, as most of those merchants still have credit card terminals that can read the magnetic stripes. Likewise, A.T.M.’s typically recognize and accept many cards whether they have a chip or a magnetic stripe. We could easily draw money from the ATM almost in all the cities we visited.

But Indian and American cardholders have had their cards rejected by automated ticket kiosks at train stations, gas pumps, parking garages and other places where there are no cashiers in Europe. Yes americans are in the same boat as us. It is also important in so much as we had no problems whatsoever in travelling across America in 2007, our credit cards worked everywhere.

Paris - I love this city

There is something about Paris (पैरी) which bewitches me, despite the snobbish french people, the language barrier, the difficult to pronounce street names or maybe its because of all this. Outside of India the one place which feels like home in the western part of the world is London. I adore London, but the fascination with Paris is much more.

This second visit to Paris was different from the first as we tried to cover the places where we had not gone before, chiefly Musee de Louvre, Chateau de Versailles, Musee d' Orsay and The Moulin Rouge.
Then there was some which we had done last time also, Seine river cruise was as mesmerising as before

The Notre dame at sunset

and Notre dame was as fascinating, Eiffel tower looked great and this time round I appreciated the view of Eiffel tower from Trocadero much more than the last time.

The Eiffel tower from Trocadero

There was so much we could not do, which we had planned. But thanks to Shaleen I managed to buy a purse from Galleries Lafayette, also something which had been overdue from last time. We were overawed by the dome at the Galleries Lafayette

The dome at Galleries Lafayette

The major let down was Eurodisney, we went there because it was here that we had sorely missed our children last time and almost cried for them at the gates of this amusement park and we had promised ourselves that we would get them here surely, but in all this we forgot that we have already been to the Mecca of theme parks and nothing can beat Orlando.
We loved walking on the Champs Elysses (शौंस एलिसी ) and standing at the Arc de Triomphe like the last time. We found our way around Paris using its metro but I think the stations were undergoing renovation, and if not they surely needed to be renovated. The musicians in the train were a novelty and I was fascinated with the different instruments which they used, with which I was not familiar except for the Piano Accordion. The french people we met on the train were mostly forthcoming and strangely we struck up more conversations with strangers on the parisian metro than on any other metro in the world. If you're planning to visit Paris the "Paris visite" is a must, it is the metro pass and it fetches discounts at many tourist attractions, we got a discount at Eurodisney.
A museum goer should get the museum pass. The Louvre (लूव)museum was all that I had expected and more.

The glass pyramid is the entrance to the Louvre Museum

It is a great museum, though we were living at walking distance from the museum we managed only a single visit there much to my disappointment, that too we just made a beeline for Mona Lisa and after that we saw a few more galleries. Musee de Orsay a railway station converted into a museum starts where Louvre leaves off. It was a beautiful museum with lovely paintings.

Musee de Orsay

Going to Versailles (वरसै)was also something which we had planned for days and stupidly I had booked the tickets for Versailles on the net for a week earlier than when we actually reached, so when we reached Versailles the tickets were of an earlier date. Shaleen had done his homework well and right at the entrance where hardly anybody was going, was a small office for redressal of problems with internet tickets and there our tickets were validated for the same day. The palace was magnificent and the gardens were huge we had to take a golf buggy on rent to see the gardens and we also saw the Marie Antoniette's palace.

Versailles

The Moulin Rouge (मूला रूज़ ) was a great show. I enjoyed myself immensely and it had the distinctive french flavour which is not possible in other shows however great.
The most beautiful building in Paris is the Opera house.

The Opera house