Unforgettable France

A small, offbeat perspective.

- Savita Singh

We had been planning our trip to France for over two years. Our plan was to see France but not as the usual tourist through a group of operators who have a set itinerary. So we made our own. We decided to spend a week in Paris and see all that tour operators show and also take a few offbeat tours out of Paris and then go on to Lyon, which is considered the food capital of France. In both places, we decided to stay in apartments.

As our knowledge of French is almost non-existent, we planned to buy a phrase book—English to French—as we had heard that the French are notorious for not understanding English or at least claiming not to. We somehow never did manage to buy the phrase book but found out that like people anywhere in the world, there are good and helpful people in France also, who would go out of their way to help us and, like everywhere else, there were grumpy, crotchety people also here, who refused to help us even when they could understand perfectly what we were saying.

The very first helpful person was our taxi driver, who not only took us to our apartment but, on the way, went out of his way to get our cell phone fitted with the local SIM so that we could at least contact anyone in France, like our landlord.

In Paris, our apartment was right next to Monoprix, a department store that is something like our Big Bazaar. So we had no problem in buying provisions for our daily use. There was also a McDonald’s right next to it, and the entrance to the underground metro was barely 20 metres from our apartment.

Apartments generally are equipped with washing machines, hotplates, ovens, microwaves, and TVs and have free wi-fi, etc, as was our apartment. Of course, the TV was useless as the channels were all in French.

EIFFEL TOWER