Lull before the storm...

“No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.”

Travel isn't cheap, especially when you talk about Europe. For an average Indian, converting the Rupees into Euros (70 to 1) and spending them on a vegetarian meal at a tourist hotspot seems more like a bankruptcy order than an absolute necessity. Add to it the sky-high costs of train and metro and you realize that exploring Europe is more about convincing your soul (and pocket) to think in a dimension scaled down 70 to 1 and trying to shell out a bit more of those priceless bucks!

It was imperative for me to arrange for a few more Euros before embarking on the next voyage. The bank balance had gone negative after the Switzerland trip and I could have got the notification from the LCL bank anyday. So, thinking wisely, I decided to work really hard for the next two weeks and was able to finish a major part of the internship project. By that time, my 2 months salary(yeah, 1 month in advance) arrived, and yo baby!! Soon enough I was basking in riches with a 2000 euro bank balance!!

So, with Phoney's active cooperation, we planned trips to Germany, Eastern Europe, Italy and Benelux for the next two months and were made lucky by the availability of dead cheap fares on Ryanair. Phoney deserves a special mention for his hard labour which made it possible to extract some bewilderingly inexpensive deals after ripping through a host of permutations and

combinations of tickets.

Phoney, who's real name is Gaurav, is a senior who went along with me for a similar internship at the same institute. His specialities included partying, running after girls, speaking Franglish and extracting cheap deals on travel. We lived in a student residence, called La Pacaterie in Orsay, a suburb of Paris. Our daily life used to revolve around office, the surrounding hills on which we used to trek everyday to reach the workplace, and the common kitchen.

We got some really interesting neighbours, each of whom deserves a special mention, probably in the subsequent posts. The common kitchen was the arena for daily interactions and the fact that Indian dishes take long to get cooked made sure that we had lots and lots of this 'Cultural Exchange' everyday. The time passed off like a breeze...