A week into the city !!!

Hi .. a week into the city and here goes in my second post ...

I ll take it off from where I left off last time... So that afternoon I went to see Paris city. I was joined by Mehul Jain (it was really me joining him, but I like it this way) and we started our little tour through Paris from Notre Dame Cathedral. The Cathedral and it surrounds for the first really got me a feel of Europe as I had seen it through the movies. The Seine passes by and its certainly quite a beautiful setting in a sunny afternoon. The Cathedral on the other hand, is well nice. Nothing exemplary but nevertheless worth a watch.

Moving on from there, we headed to this place called invalides which had an arms museum which houses Napolean's tomb. Now I have always wondered why they build such grand tombs : is it the celebration of our man's life or his death ? For Napolean i think different people can interpret it differently. Anyways we then walked through the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais (the big palace and the small palace) on towards Champs Elysee which is like this really posh driveway towards the Arc de Triomphe. There we ended our mini tour and we proceeded towards this very Indianish place from where we could get some Indian stuff (I think I saw Vicco turmeric there too ... aah those lovely ads !!!! ) Anyways you can find the pictures here ...
http://picasaweb.google.co.in/naman33k/FirstDayOutInParis02?authkey=Gv1sRgCMjCkb3SyLqRYA&feat=directlink

Now that was my little tour; otherwise life through the week has been cool. I have started to understand my work and now I need to run through the code and understand it to really spark it off.

My cooking exploits .. umm .. I d call them avergeish good (I hope you get what i mean there). I mean I have successfully cooked good Aloo Tamatar, awesome rice and pretty tasty Daal. I call it averageish 'cause I really have not experimented much but I think I will through this week.

Weather ko toh meri khud ki nazar lag gayi. It has turned gloomy and has started to drizzle. Aah, rain here certainly makes things worse as it is often accompanied by lots of chill, but still I think its only going to get better as we head into June.

More or less that sums up the week and my next post would be based upon the outline of the theory that I have read over this time and my work here, so if you are just by chance following this blog (i hope there is at least one homosapien doing this) and are not so particularly interested in theoretical stuff, you just may wanna skip it. Hope you are having a good time wherever you are !!

Au revoir ..

First Impressions

Now this is like my first post on any blog, so I highly doubt the interesting-ness of the post. Yet in case you are ready to bear a not so interesting account of the first impressions of an interesting city on a not so interesting person, you may read on.

Now I am here in Paris to do an intern at the LSV lab in ENS Cachan. Its a two and a half month thing and this blog shall mostly be a documentation (if i may call it so) of these times.

Its been exactly 76 hrs since I have been here in Paris and they have been well nice. Interestingly someone very recently pointed to me that "nice" is the only adjective that I have to describe things. Agreed . But more than a lack of vocabulary I owe it to the strength of this small 4 letter word. For me this word has always meant an emotion that is pretty balanced in its description of anything. Neither is it out of the roof nor is it very dull. So Paris for me in these first 76 hrs has been "nice".

Getting down here at the airport, two things struck me first up - the cold weather and the lack of any sort of line at the immigration counter. This was like the first time that I had boarded out of an airplane and was ready to collect baggage in like 5 minutes. This might be usual for expansive travellers but for a person like me who has only seen Asia .. this was something new.

Now moving on to the weather. Its cold but certainly not gloomy, Thats why I have slowly started to fall in love with this weather. The skies are mostly clear with the sun coming down nicely but the chill still lingers in the wind. The sun sets really late...something like 8.45 types.
The weather mixed with the locale that I live in has resulted into like a perfect blend for a summer.

This brings me to the place I live, which is a beautiful suburb outside Paris called Orsay. Now Paris unfortunately is obscenely expensive and if you are not taking a univ. acco you might just get a bad deal. This is what happened with me and I am now stuck into this really small room (of the size of IITian rooms really !!) for this month (though I will be moving out to Cachan just a doorstep away from my lab next month). But around my place live a lot of Indians and though certian people might not like it this way but they have really been great help (to the extent that the girl living above me has cooked two dinners for me). This brings me to the people here.....

French though not versed with English are still pretty nice people. They help or at least try to help (most of it goes into vain 'cause they blabber French and it sounds Greek to me). French kids are beautiful and so are French girls (but since they are mostly taller so they lose out to the kids :)). One of the nicest gestures that I have got to see here is on the road : cars actually stop and wait for you to cross even when the green light is on. Again I am not sure whether this is commonplace or not but well to an Indian jerk it is certainly striking.

Now I am not sure whether you have survived this first post of mine which as I said was more of a documentation than anything else. You may comment if you want to but its certainly not obligatory. I plan to go around Paris city this afternoon so you can expect the next post to be salted and peppered with certain pictures.

Au revoir .. bonne journee