Paris Redux

With celebrations of graduation done yesterday, it’s time to proceed on to the climax of Mama’s holiday tour. Of all the places in Europe, I felt that Paris was one place which Mama deserved to have a look at. Since time is a constraint for her, I could only pick one destination outside England and naturally that destination is Paris. Besides, it’ll be great to reminisce the fact that I had visited the French capital twice within the year. We made our way to the Leeds Bradford airport where our Jet2 flight is scheduled to be at 10am. However, it got delayed by an hour and we ended up waiting for it at the lounge. While waiting, I found out that Ling Wei is also on the same flight me and he’s also bringing his mother to Paris. Haha..what a coincidence and we are both giving our mothers the same holiday treat. We reached Paris CDG Airport at around 2pm or so and proceeded to take the train down to the city center.

Finding our hotel ain’t that hard because it’s located in one of the main streets. I learnt my lesson from Barcelona, so this time I made sure I double checked the location. At the hotel however, we had a small problem in locating our room because of the way the rooms are connected in the building. The room itself is ain’t too shabby. In fact, I found it to be better than the one which I stayed with Leo although the pricing is about the same and mine includes breakfast too. After putting our items in the room, we headed out. The first destination I had in mind was the Notre Dame since it’s gonna be closed in the evening, so it’s good to have a look inside it. We started walking from St. Michael’s square since that’s the place in which the free tour starts. However, we are not following any free tour as I would be the one giving the personal tour to Mama instead. I followed through the almost same exact route that the free tour covered and as expected, we managed to reach Notre Dame after the long walk through the streets of Paris. We stayed inside the Notre Dame until it closes. After that, we quickly made our way to the Eiffel Tower. Unlike the previous time, I’ve smarten up by taking a train to the nearest Metro to the Eiffel Tower. I went to my favourite spot to take photos with the Eiffel the second time. We also took the opportunity to head down to the base of the Eiffel. Ah, all of these must have been quite an eye-opener for Mama. With the drizzling weather, it was quite hard to get a decent shot of ourselves with the Eiffel Tower. Once we were satisfied with the photo-taking, we departed from the area before it started to rain even more heavily. By then it was almost night-time. We ate our dinner at a kebab stall (cheap option as usual) before returning to the hotel for a rest. Gotta get some rest before a long day tomorrow.

French breakfast in the morning at the hotel was superb. It was scrumptious with plenty of pastries, jam, butter, cheese and bread to go around. The only thing lacking is some proper meat and ham like those in Amsterdam. The breakfast area was kinda cramped but we managed to squeeze ourselves onto a table. We needed to check out from the hotel after breakfast since we weren’t going to go back to the hotel anymore. I had made sure earlier that I carry a minimum load since I’ll be moving around with my bag for the whole day. The first destination on the list is the Louvre. I was aware of the crazy hour-long queue to the Louvre that I saw earlier in April so there is definitely a need to be there early. The Louvre was somewhere which Leo and I missed the last time and I promised myself that I’ll definitely make my way there this time round. We travelled by train to the Louvre. It seems that the whole compound is actually attached to the Metro. There was already a queue but it was not as long as the one up on the surface. Woahhh, to think that everyone rushed to line-up upstairs when it’s smooth-flowing underground. With my international student card, I managed to obtain a free entry into the Louvre! Woohoooo! Mama paid around €10 for hers. So, off we went to explore the place once we got our tickets. The Louvre museum is a massive compound and it has 3 different wings for visitors to explore – Sully, Richelieu and Denon. Because of time constraints, I could only explore 1 wing fully while the other 2 had to be breezed past in a jiff. There are plenty of artworks, sculptures and paintings to admire. One of the more impressive parts of the museum is the fully furnished royal quarters which give visitors a peek inside the palace’s luxurious lifestyle. There are Egyptian and Babylonian artefact housed inside too. Of course, visitors can’t miss the most famous inhabitant of the Louvre – the Mona Lisa. The room where it was housed was crowded to the brim. Fortunately, I had my super-zoom camera which allows me to capture the Mona Lisa from the distance at high resolution. The size of the painting is actually very small and it’s not as big as what many people assumed it to be. Ahhh, that’s another small lifetime achievement fulfilled – having a look at the real Mona Lisa. =D

One of my Leeds lecturer suggested that I head up the Arc de Triomph instead of the Eiffel Tower to get a bird’s eye view of the city. We had to queue up for quite some time before we could get to the top. It was a tough climb up the stairs of the Arc and at the top, I needed a minute to catch my breath. Nevertheless, all the climbing was not for nothing. The view at the top of the Arc is truly amazing. As the Arc is the centre and a roundabout at the same time, I could get a 360 degrees view of the city, stretching to as far as the business district known as the Defence. At another angle, I could spot the Eiffel Tower in the distance. After feeling satisfied exploring on the top, we walked down to the surface. Apparently, there is a French Legion commemoration ceremony and the area around the ‘Eternal Flame’ is cordoned off for the veterans to gather. With the little time left before evening comes, we went hunting for my brother’s birthday present. We combed through both sides of the shopping district and we finally settled for a bag at the Adidas shop. We bought an additional duffle bag to contain some of my things which I want Mama to bring back to Singapore.

Our mode of transportation back to England was by the night Eurostar train to London since that was the only period of time I could ensure that our time in Paris is maximised. We went to the French fast food chain known as ‘Q’ to take away some food and went to wait at the train station earlier than our scheduled departure time. In fact, I expected our train to be listed at the screen. At around 30 minutes before the departure time, I sensed that something was amiss when our train still had not listed the boarding gate yet. I quickly rushed to inquire about the place to board the Eurostar train and to my horror, we were actually at the wrong place. Oh silly me! That was when I realised that we actually needed to go past immigration too since we are travelling into England, the land of fussy clearances. Arghhh..both mama and I quickly went up and it seems that the gate was about to close already and worse of all, we’ve not filled up the immigration cards, something which we did not expect because we thought that we only need to do that over in England. It seems that for trains, immigration cards have to filled right at the country of departure. With all that fumble, we were fortunate that the officer waivered the need and proceeded in just checking our boarding pass and passport. 10 minutes later, our Eurostar train departed. Whew! That was a close call and a stupid bummer too if we had missed the train after arriving so early on time. I had actually wanted to experience going through the English Channel’s underwater tunnel but I was so tired that I ended up dozing off. When I woke up, we were already gonna reach King’s Cross station. From there we took a connecting train to Leeds at reached at about 2am+. We did some quick packing up upon reaching the house since Mama would have to take an early train there to Manchester to check in for the flight back to Singapore.

Things did not turn out as planned in the morning when I accompanied Mama to the train station. The train scheduled to take Mama was cancelled. This meant that we had to take another train at the risk of being late for check in which starts at 11am. Thank God that by the time we reached Manchester Airport, check-in is still on-going. One interesting sight that I spotted while I was waiting with Mama is that I spotted members of Blackburn FC coming out. There was one person I spotted to be Michel Salgador because of his golden locks. Lol, that’s a mini treat on its own but nobody at the airport seemed to be bothered about their presence. I stayed with Mama until she went past the boarding gate. The whole journey of accompanying Mama through the process of departure was vital because this would be a mini rehearsal of the real thing when it’s my turn to return to Malaysia on 30th August. I was a little sad to see Mama go but I knew that it won’t be long before I get to see her again. I picked the cheaper option to return back to Leeds which is by bus. Since I didn’t get a good sleep yesterday, I dozed off quickly on the bus. It’ll be quite some time before my next big activity in August so I’ll just chill out and laze around in Leeds for the moment.