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Rover Recommends How to Measure Paris by Metro

 

 Paris, Paris. There’s nothing like the City of Love. You’ll definitely fall in love with its structures and corners. If you have the chance and the time in the world, you can walk for days on end around this lovely, lovely city, but you won’t find any end to its beauty and grandeur.

So, what if you only have a couple of hours (preferably at least a day) and a few euros to spare? Let’s try to measure the City of Love by metro (and other convenient transportation) based on what #RoverRecommends.


Your ticket to this French wonderland is called the Ticket Mobilis. It’s a day ticket that currently costs starting from Eur. 7.30 only, but will allow you unlimited number of journeys within selected zones of Paris on all modes of transport. It is valid from 00:00 to 23:59. You can purchase it at ticket offices in rail stations, on automatic ticket machines and in some shops.

1.       Let's say we start from Olympiades, the southern end of line 14, from which we proceed to Bibliothèque François Mitterrand, then change to RER C to Saint-Michel-Notre –Dame.


Our First Stop is at the Notre Dame Cathedral, where French Gothic architecture adorned with gargoyles and chimeras would take you back to scenes of the movie, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Across the river is my favorite secondhand bookshop (well, along with those literarily scattered about the streets) in Paris, Shakespeare and Company.

[If you’re up for it, you can go tomb-raiding at not-so-nearby Paris Cemetery where you can try looking for graves of famous people like singers and musicians Frederic Chopin, Jim Morrison and Edith Piaf as well as writers Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, and Honore De Balzac, and just about the strangest and most fascinating tombs in the world. It’s an hour walk from Notre Dame one way, so no matter how interesting the prospect is, you might set aside your Lara Croft skills and fan mode for another time.]


2.       Again from Saint Michel, we take 27 towards Gare Saint-Lazareand stop at ...
The Louvre Museum. Perhaps, the Museum of museums, where the Mona Lisa awaits to half-smile at you. It’s a big place, so we might take a couple of hours here.
[Actually, a few strides away is the Musee D’Orsay, another very important museum and a less-frenzied alternative. But then, again, Louvre would take time. So, another day then.]


3.       From Palais Royal Musée du Louvre, we take 1 towards La Defense and stop at Franklin D. Roosevelt to marvel at the...
The Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile, Champs-Élysées.  The arch that pays tribute to the heroes of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars stands majestic at the centre of the famous Parisian roundabout that we usually see in movies.

4.       From Rond-Point des Champs-Elysees take bus 42 towards Hôpital Européen
       Georges Pompidou and stop by the ...


The Eiffel Tower. On my very first time in Paris, I was treated to one of the best surprises in my life when my French friend took us along without saying anything only to be greeted by this beautiful iconic monument as we alighted from the metro.

[From here to our last stop, a long ride awaits. And so, don’t get mad at me if I told you that for now we have to skip Moulin Rouge, which is along the way, just to be able to catch the sunset at our last destination.]



5.       From Monttessuy, we take Bus42 Gare du Nord to Concorde - Cours la Reine, then change to Metro 12 Front Populaire towards Abbesses and walk up to...

Montmartre.  Where by sunset we can enjoy a view of the City of Love as it transforms into...the city of Lights. Here, we look back at our daytrip as we look down at the City that has been enchanting everyone for centuries.




So should I book a Ticket Mobilis for two? // Unshod Rover for Oasis Holidays 


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For  a guided tour of Paris and other cities in France as well as tour and pilgrimage packages in Europe, you may contact our subsidiary Volando Tours.  

For Tour and Travels India as well as International packages from India, please contact us at Oasis Holidays. 

Unshod Rover is a worldwide-eyed wanderer currently based in Bangalore, India. You may follow his musings and journeys on this blog. "All Rover the World" chronicles his continuing travels wandering about the world and stumbling upon strangers.

Testing the waters in Nice: Coasting Redfoot along the French Riviera


For the sculptor, there's the chisel and the block of wood or marble. For the poet, the pen and the paper. For the traveler, the wanderer, he has his footwear and the world. 

Art always creates, expresses, presents and most of the time, generates a certain trace, produces a tangible “work of art”. Wandering, however, leaves only footprints. Not totally though as traveling permits the wanderer to discover cities, meet people, interact with strangers, and learn cultures. In the process, he takes notes of these experiences, the history, the stories attached to each city square or statue, a dish or a tradition, a legend or a saying.

These are notes that both the wanderer and the footwear pick up all throughout the journey, may it be through sandy or pebbled coasts, cobbled roads or dusty ruins, a puddle of water or a sheep's path. The foot directs, the footwear describes. The dialogue, the relationship between the two defines the experience. Designs.

(“Redfoot” is such dialogue, the relationship between the author and the footwear (a pair of red alpargatas bought from a street vendor in Florence). “Wandering Redfoot” documents the journey of the foot and the red alpargatas in various degrees of rest and reflection and re-creation.)


We were caught red-footed for the first time on a drizzly late April morning walking through the length of the Place Massena in Nice under the weight of the seven statues composing Jaume Plensa's Conversation a Nice. The statues represent the seven continents in dialogue, particularly at nighttime when they are lit in various, ever-changing colors. That day though, back in their original white, the statues were in deep contemplative mode as muted by the morning mist and the dark gray overcast.


On one foot, we thought that with technology, this conversation among the continents is very much possible as facilitated especially by the internet and telecommunications, and the growth and spread of social networks. On the other, traveling and migration has also been a great part in weaving dialogues among peoples and cultures, creating a web of concrete relationships and deeper connections one step, one stranger, one city at a time.


As it continued raining, we took hurried strides and took refuge by the building behind the Fontaine du Soleil, where a statue of Apollo, god of all the arts and patron of poetry, is surrounded by allegorical sculptures of the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and Saturn. Apollo, principally symbolized by the sun according to mythology, must have heard our unspoken plight as the skies started to clear up as we made our way through the souvenir shops, the open market riddled with stalls of flowers and plants and the fish market, a few steps away from the sea.

And for some law that perhaps only Thales could understand and fully explain, as soon as we reached the pebbled beach, the foot took off to meet the water, and left me to rest a few feet away from the waltzing waves. The sea must have been cold and the sun yet to wake up as the foot came back and sat beside me and started to narrate a summary of our very first night in Nice:


That night, after a rainy morning of traveling from Milan to Ventimiglia to Nice, and looking for the hotel, and an afternoon of scouring for lunch that led to an evening of scouring for dinner, the foot rested its tired sole by the window of the hotel, looking over the blinking lights of the restaurants, the sporadic reunions of compatriots, the rains that have washed the city clean, all vacuumed into bins of garbage collected by the city truck. The foot watched this scene, as if already a ritual, a tradition, some sort of gathering. Everything was almost silenced though by the glass that divided the room and the street. It had been a long three to four months of organizing the foot's eclectic thoughts into a master's thesis. The foot had somehow missed the chaos of the city, the spontaneity. And it was for the first time, that the foot took me out of the plastic bag still smelling of the Florence central market, and lined me by the ledge for airing out. And as he looked at the cars lined up along the avenue like arrows all leading toward the sea, he thought of the coming summer.


We left the beach just as Apollo started to spread its arms over the city, there was a train to catch unfortunately. Passing by the cities along the northern Cote D'Azur stretch, by then all awash in sunlight, the foot had to take me off as it started to get uncomfortable. Finger slid in between the toes, as if to brush off sand, as if to send the continents, the universe some sort of communication, pulling all the remaining days of spring and re-arranging Apollo's schedule, an invitation for a  midsummer walk and some good old conversation. The foot just couldn't wait to paint the northern coasts of the other side of the Mediterranean red. //  Unshod Rover for Oasis Holidays
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For guided tours as well as other tour and travel packages in Nice and other cities in France and Europe, you may contact our subsidiary Volando Tours.  

For Tour and Travels India as well as International packages from India, please contact us at Oasis Holidays. 

Unshod Rover is a worldwide-eyed wanderer currently based in Bangalore, India. You may follow his musings and journeys on this blog. "All Rover the World" chronicles his continuing travels wandering about the world and stumbling upon strangers.
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