Contemplations and Ruminations

I never expected to be on another trip so soon after my last trip to Europe in September 2013, but here I am sitting in my sister's house in New Jersey, trying to complete my travel posts from last year. Well,what can I say... the horizons keep beckoning and I keep following... Now for a sneak peek of what I've been gazing at over the past month... Manhattan in the distance and the Hudson in all her serenely swaying beauty... Now getting back to Lyon , the gastronomic capital of France and one of it's largest cities, which we (me, Nam and Vinod) decided to explore one fine Sunday in October 2013. Lyon is just a two hour train ride away from Geneva, and once we got off the train we decided to head first to, Pérouges, one of the most beautiful villages in France , located near Lyon. After visiting Yvoire , we made it a point to scout out other beautiful villages near any city we visited. So we asked around and surprisingly no one knew how to get to Pérouges, so we ...

So after the evening mass on Sunday,   we climbed up the 284 winding steps...  Of the Arc de Triomphe, here she is lit up at night... And from the top of the Arc, this is how the Eiffel Tower looks at night... It sparkles a few minutes every hour... and then people start kissing on top of the Arc. It was cute until this one teenage guy almost ate his girlfriend's face, licking and kissing with so much ferocity, she almost looked like voldemort when he was done. But everybody else was cute and the whole atmosphere up there on the Arc was pretty exciting...  Pretty neat huh...  Champs Elysees Avenue as seen from the Arc... we went strolling along this avenue on the way back. You'll find many street performers on this avenue... The next day being our last day in Paris, the guys decided on a Seine cruise and I learnt the reason for this later on. They didn't want to walk and so they made sure I was stuck on a boat, this way I could...

After checking out the major sights in Paris, we decided to go to Versailles which is about half an hour from Paris.  The walk from the station to the palace of Versailles is pretty good, a nice long avenue with trees lining either side... it's a beautiful stretch and this is how avenues should be you know, quiet and calm with trees swaying peacefully overhead and you walking around with not a care in the world, just the thought of another exciting day. Versailles, was a nice change from chaotically exciting Paris, it's more peaceful and charming not to mention less crowded and intrusive than Paris. The golden gate at the entrance to the palace of Versailles .  There was quite a long queue outside this gate waiting to enter the palace, one look at the winding queue and we retreated the way we came through the beautiful avenue and continued strolling about Versailles,exploring other places. I and I guess the others too weren't keen on seeing an opulent palace, a ...