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I was told when I moved here that the rest of Europe would be at my fingertips.  I didn’t realize just how true that statement was until I went to Paris last month.  Two and a half hours on the Eurostar is all it takes to be in a different world.  Amazing.  I met Parul and Shankara at King’s Cross Station on a Friday evening to catch the 7:45PM train.  We checked in, cleared security and had our passports checked just as you would if you were taking an international flight…ok, ok so I was a bit enamoured by it all, but hey, it was my first international train ride, I was excited!  We boarded the train, and spent the next few hours gossiping and playing UNO.  My friends and I have had this obsession with playing UNO for the past month or so.  I hadn’t played this much since I was about 10!  We got to La Gard du Nord (Paris North station), and bought tickets for the metro.  Our hotel was in the 11th district, near the Voltaire station.  It was close to midnight by the time we checked in and were ready to hit the town.  We weren’t sure how late the metro stayed open so we wandered to a bar nearby to get a drink.  My French, I soon realized, is probably worse than a 2 yr old’s…as I was struggling to order a vodka and coke.  They didn’t have vodka so we asked for rum instead.  The bartender must have thought we were alcoholics because he filled the glass with rum and topped it off with coke!  That was enough to sustain me for a while.  John and Naresh met up with us at the bar and we chatted for a while.  They had come in the day before and were telling us of their travels.  We were all a bit tired from the week so we wandered back to the hotel to get some sleep.  Paris had been experiencing a heat wave, and just like London, there is no air conditioning in the hotels.  Well, at least not in the two star ones.  I’m sure if we had decided to pony up for the Ritz we would have some A/C, but, we thought we’d save that for another trip.  ;-)  We managed to survive the night…it actually wasn’t that bad, we had a couple of windows, and luckily a light breeze was blowing so we left them open. 

On Saturday, we spent most of the day just wandering around the streets of Paris.  It helps having a friend that lived there before, and knows some of the locals.  The evening was spent having a picnic by the Seine, with one of Paris’s most famous restaurants right behind us, La Tour D’Argent.  Afterwards, we headed over to a club called Le Tango.  This place is open so late that they even serve breakfast at 4AM!  No, we didn’t stick around to see how it was, but came pretty close. 

Needless to say, getting up the next morning was no easy feat.  We were supposed to meet Shankara at the Ganesh festival, in which him and probably over a thousand others walk along the streets of Paris to celebrate the birth of the Hindu God Ganesha.  I didn’t know what to expect, but what I saw was simply amazing.  For a minute I thought I had been transported to southern India.  I’d never seen so many barefoot sari and dhoti-clad people, broken coconuts, and garlands in my life!  Dozens were pulling chariots that housed bronzed statues of Ganesh though the streets, chanting prayers.  We joined the devotees on their walk for a few minutes near the end of their journey.