French Connection

Beginning of March I visited Grenoble, a small city in France. Although it was an official visit, I could manage to go around and see some places in Grenoble and Paris.

Grenoble is a valley city with lots of beautiful snow tipped mountains around it. From Paris we took a TGV (France’s super speed trains) to Lyon and then a regular train to Grenoble.




“The Eternal wait of Taxi”
Unfortunately, we were booked in a hotel away from city. Other than being away from the city, the worst part every morning was waiting for taxi to pick us up for office. It could range anywhere between 15 minutes to 1 hour. This very regularly gave us time to share thoughts about times to come in our professional lives.
The funny part was that sometimes the taxi driver would arrive and then wait for us for 30 minutes and later tell us that he has come for us only. Thanks to the language barrier that we started those chosen days with frustration.

If you think that sign language is always there to save people like us then even the sign language would lead us into problem. Asking him how much money he makes using sign language may lead the taxi to the nearest ATM because the driver thought that you want to encash money.

“The Power Shower”
Out of curiosity if you happen to fully turn the hand shower knob to check the flow then you can enjoy a snake dance in bath tub. The water gushes out with full speed and the hand shower would go out of control and dance like snake in bath tub. It is only co-incidental that you and the bathroom gets wet with this.

If that is not enough then read this. The shower in bath room was mounted on a one-of-its kind angle. The water would typically fall on the wall on which it was mounted. So if you desire to take bath with shower mounted on its hook then you need to have spider man like wall climbing and sticking features. You literally have to embrace yourself to wall to enjoy shower.

“The Food”
Not many people would say that but I liked eating at company’s cafeteria. The food was French and there were options, Chinese, Mexican et all. To us all appeared as French as the names were written in French on the menu display.
So why did I like the French food, because it was bland. It did not have any taste of its own. Once I added lots of salt, black pepper, Tabasco and other spices, I could easily Indianize it and eat.

"The Paris Expedition – Day 1”
Finally the work was over and we had a chance to go to Paris. Lots of expectation from this weekend as we were visiting the city of fashion, glitters and monuments.
On way back too, we took train from grenoble to lyon and then TGV to Paris. Ok, here I must tell you that don’t rely on restrooms of the platform. We figured out that people tend to use it more often than toilets at home. Susmit, Jayanth and Gurudatta tried in vain to relieve themselves.
Finally we reached Paris. All excited as if we have achieved our final goal of this trip.

The hotel was located inside the paris airport and I had a view of concorde from my room. The sight was awesome and room was excellent. Though the hotel was away from city we never regretted staying far from city.

The two days that we spent in paris were the most adventurous days of our visit.
We had some great discussions on which car is better on road and Gurudatta giving his explanation that truck driver cannot force Scorpios off the tarred road while maruti 800’s are easier picks, hence he next car would be a Scorpio. We successfully attempted to keep professional talks away from these last two days.


“Bir hakim”
This is one of the numerous metro station names which we till date cannot pronounce properly. It is actually called “Bir Hakeim”, for convenience sake Shiv transformed or indianized it. But this station has more than just indianization, this is the very station where we saw a person promoting an Indian restaurant. Jayanth somehow got hypnotized by this person and would not agree to dine anywhere else. From a distant corner of paris we came back hunting for this restaurant and to make things worse rain gods also joined us in expedition. Finally we managed to dehypnotize Jayanth and come back to hotel where we ate ……will tell you later.

Coming back to names, we could make out after 24 hrs that Champs-Elysées is pronounced as “shahn-zay-lee-ZAY”. Someone verbally told that you must visit shahn-zay-lee-ZAY . While I was reading a road sign, a lighting struck my head and I realized that I am already standing on so called road. How in this world do French expect us to pronounce it like that?


“I am Monalisa”

Finally, we met Monalisa on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. However we were more impressed by other paintings in museum .
In Louvre's gallery, a single “s” to make “painting” plural is not sufficient. There are hundreds of paintings in Louvre Museum. And I bet you can not see all in your life time.
Ok ... , one analogy we noticed while appreciating the paintings and sculptures. We defined a theorem based on this analogy.
You can never ever, ever never, never ever ever ……whatever, become a French artist till your subject is wearing clothes.

“Tyre Technology Metro”
One of the greatest technological innovation, though we found it funny, was a metro train running on rubber tyres. No not joking, it was real, infact we were so much surprised and disapproved what we saw that we waited for two more trains to pass before boarding, just to make sure that it was actually running on rubber tyres and not on any other metal tyre which is not visible externally.

“Freestyle French market”

Five of us split into two groups. Susmit and jayanth went back to bangalore on Sunday morning and myself, gurudatta and shiv planned to stay back to enjoy paris. On Sunday we visited a freestyle market lane of france after de-boarding at chatelet (nick named: cutlet by me). It has lots of freestyles eateries, bars and pubs.
An unusual contest - Two pubs were contesting with each other in an unusual way. For evey customer which enters the pub they would break a bone china plate at entrance. Whoever has more broken pieces of plates would take pride and swell his chest. More broken plates also means that people like his pub more than next door pub.
May be we should have tried fooling them by going in and coming out within few seconds without eating or drinking. Hmmm ........ then probably we might have seen some broken bones too.



“Paris ka Taj Mahal”

How can someone write a blog and not write about Tour Eiffel (Eiffel Tower). It was magnificent and even more marvelous at night.
We almost would have missed the sparkles if I and Gurudatta did not wait for clicking few more pictures of tower. I don’t think that the magnificence of this tower can be described in words, it is worth a visit even though there are more taller structures than this one.

The last section is dedicated to our all time companion. Whenever we were in trouble we relied on it.

“Cup-o-Noodle: The Savior”
People who have not traveled to Europe (minus UK) and Far East can never imagine what the power of this magic container is. Without this our trip would not have been worth this blog. I would be criticizing company’s management for sending me to the alien land. Moreover apart from saving us from starvation at night it had a dual effect of saving cost.