Paris & Versailles

June 2017

We flew from Mumbai. We knew it was going to be hot, but it was scorching and sunny in a way I had not packed for. Not at all the city I had imagined from postcards. I had been studying French since the sixth grade, was halfway through ninth when we landed, and discovered very quickly that the French taught in school and the French actually spoken on a Métro platform are two different languages. I could read every sign in the city. I could not, when spoken to, do much about it.

The Eiffel Tower from directly beneath, the lattice rising into a clear blue sky.
Looking up the south leg. Every rivet visible from below.

Before any of this, there was the camera. Dad and I had watched a video together a few weeks earlier and he had offered to buy me a GoPro for the trip. I asked for a DSLR instead. The Nikon D5300 came home in a box I still remember the weight of. By the time we landed in Paris it was a week old, and the first proper frames it ever took were these. You can probably tell. The first day with a new camera mostly looks like learning what the buttons do.

The Seine looking west from a footbridge, Eiffel Tower small on the horizon, Musée d'Orsay roof on the right.
From a footbridge over the Seine. Eiffel small in the distance, Musée d'Orsay's roof on the right.
A stone allegorical figure on the Pont Alexandre III pylon, holding a gilded sword and shield against a blue sky.
Pont Alexandre III. The bronze sword catches the sun for about an hour a day. I remember being slightly thrilled that I could read the inscriptions.

We walked. Paris is a walking city in the way Switzerland is a sitting-on-trains city, and so we did mostly that. There was a hotel on a small street off the Champs-Élysées that I still picture as the warmest room I have ever stayed in, despite it being thirty-three degrees outside. Bakeries on every corner. We learned to point.

Aerial view of the Champ de Mars from the top of the Eiffel Tower at golden hour, École Militaire centred at the far end and Les Invalides golden dome on the upper-left horizon.
Champ de Mars, from the top of the tower. Les Invalides golden dome in the upper-left corner.

We climbed the tower in the late afternoon and stayed long enough to see the sun set twice. Up there it does that. Once when it dips below the La Défense skyline, again a few minutes later when the last of it disappears behind the cluster's tallest building. Different colour each time. We had nowhere to be.

Sunset over La Défense from the Eiffel Tower, sun sitting just above the silhouetted skyscrapers.
Sunset over La Défense a few minutes later, sun half-disappeared behind a tower, sky deep red-orange.
Same tripod. A few minutes apart. La Défense at the horizon.

Once the sun had gone down properly the tower started to sparkle on the hour, and the whole city stopped what it was doing for five minutes. Then we took the Métro back. Whatever French I had been pleased to recognise on the bridges did not survive contact with the announcements at République.

The garden façade of the Palace of Versailles, with the parterre and trimmed hedges in front.
Versailles, the day after. We beat the tour buses by about an hour.
The Apollo fountain at Versailles in full play, Apollo's chariot rising from the basin with horses, water arcing on either side.
The Apollo fountain runs on the hour and stops.

It was my birthday the next day. We spent it at Disneyland Paris, which I am genuinely too embarrassed to have photos of. The morning after that we were on a TGV south, watching France turn into something steeper.