Europe and Everything Else! (Part 1)

Europe! What a continent. What an amazing place to be. After accepting the exchange semester offer from Ecole Centrale de Nantes and coming to terms with leaving the final semester, the 8^th semester of my IIT life, I had decided one thing: to make it absolutely worth it. Luckily, Europe allowed that to happen. Let’s start with Nantes: I was told that France is an unfriendly country and people aren’t helpful at all. Nantes proved all of that wrong. Being a university town it bustles with a lot of students be it French or other nationalities which makes it a very liveable place in France. The French people are extremely helpful and do try to comprehend the English speaking students and go sometimes out of their way to help. This was totally contradictory to what I had heard. I had thought that the French people do not like foreigners. However, Nantes wasn’t like that at all. I guess it only exists in Paris and some other places. Rightly called the capital, Paris is responsible for creating a very negative image of France. I am glad I get to stay in Nantes. However, one thing is for sure and that is you need to know French to make friends with the French. I haven’t made any French friends yet which isn’t very surprising given my abysmal French and nearly zilch zeal towards learning it. I in fact landed up making a lot of Italian and Spanish friends given their awesome social nature. These guys are so much fun and take life as it comes. There is so much to learn and grow living with people who have totally different culture than the one you have become comfortable with. Meeting Antonio was the best thing that happened. Antonio Manco! A crazy Italian who carries his heart on his hand and is in love with every other girl he meets. Simply put he is the Joey from Friends without much action for real :P An amazing friend and a vibrant person. Thanks to him I met a lot of other Italian guys and it has been always an amazing time with them. Be it the Hangara Banana time ( Pub place in Nantes) or the dinner or the clubs. They are always crazy wherever they go. I have also become good friends with Barbara who is like an elder sister always smiling and fun to hang out with. The St. Patricks day fun, the Berlioz dinners, the Australian Disc, the Irish Pub are just a few fun moments to pen down out of the infinitely long list of awesome times that I’ve had with these guys. Nantes wouldn’t have been so alive without them.

An exchange semester is totally different from an internship. It’s a significant period of time in a new place and it’s not just about spending good weekends after a week full of work. Each and every day is a surprise. New people, new places, new information, new food etc. it’s amazing. It’s not just about a professor or your work, it’s about how well you can gel in the new scenario and be able to totally exploit the opportunities the place has to offer within whatever time you’ve got. The voice at the back of my head always made me feel guilty for missing the last semester and all the related memories. This in fact is turning out to be a great motivation to go out there and just have fun. Just participate in any activity which I think an undergrad needs to participate in before graduation. Of course it’s Europe so I spend very less energy thinking about what others think of me and just keep doing what I wanna do.

As it’s said the other side of the grass is always green, I haven’t explored Nantes yet and have been all over Europe. (Which reminds me I need to visit the Elephant of Nantes.) While I am discussing about Nantes itself let me mention about Ecole Centrale. It’s a small college area wise and makes me miss the landscape of IITG of course. However, it’s a pretty decent college. The courses that I have been pursuing has a relatively good set of professors and the timetable is pretty relaxed as an exchange student. For master students it’s definitely a busy week just like it would be in general. The best course I feel is the Numerical Analysis course which is so challenging that it’s irresistibly engaging. I haven’t yet seriously started preparing for it (examination point of view) but it’s fun to have a 2 hour class if it’s interesting. It's because sometimes preparing for an examination is very different from actually enjoying the subject. I am glad that I have been able to do the latter. That was one thing which is very different here. Every class is for 2 hours! Now that can be pretty good or preettttyyyy bad. However this saves a lot of miscellaneous time that’s wasted for students like commutation etc. which overall gives an extra couple of hours in the week.

Speaking about time, for exchange students like me it’s good to have a couple of extra hours for cooking and all other home related activities. It’s living for real “ostsut there” and I am loving the independence. The other activities reminds me of a lethal activity I do every day and that’s cooking. My body is constantly fighting the toxicity it is subjected to with my cuisine. However the reason why cooking is become less worse is thanks to Prathamesh, another Heritage fellow from IIT Bombay who takes the pain to come to my apartment every evening to eat with me. Another one task we share is going to Leclerc and LiDL – the two supermarkets close to our place. The memories of carrying infinite food and domestic stuff and walking all the way back home is not going to missed but is going to be cherished forever. This one time we literally overloaded ourselves with so much shopping that there were 5 minutes breaks for every 2 minutes of walking back home. Crazy days! However foot is not always the option in Nantes given it’s awesome bus and tramways. One exclusive joke between Prathamesh and me is the way the recorded voice announces the station names in French in the trams and busses. “Ligne un terminus Beajoure!!” A very special memory indeed.

The great part about ECN are the continuous holidays and breaks we get for things like Easter etc.  This allowed Prathamesh and me to come up with a highly researched and exacting Euro trip plan. It was going to be a 17 day continuous trip covering France, Monaco, Italy, Vatican, Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Netherlands and Belgium. Just the statement “ A 17 day Euro Trip” had so much gravity in it, we were pulled into the idea categorically. One what the fuck moment was when we ordered our Eurail Pass and it was going to be shipped to India! Thank god Prathamesh realized that and had Skype credits to make an immediate call to Singapore and divert the shipping from India to France. A narrow escape! After all it was 380 Euros each at stake and we would never get more than half a month’s time to travel carefree! All’s well that ends well. The Eurail passes arrived :D

We decided to travel from Paris without making a reservation of a TGV because apparently Paris via Orleans was a “scenic” route mentioned by Eurail. What the great people did not mention is the time of the year when it is scenic. We began our journey early in the morning from Gare SNCF ( I am reading this stations name in that ladies recorded voice in the tram which I so wish could be put here) With Prathamesh missing the bus to the station and then walking all the way to a stop to reach SNCF we finally made there. We sat in the train from Nantes to Orleans and soon realized there was nothing scenic. Felt so stupid within the hour 1 of the Euro trip. We slept through it and reached Paris in 3 hours instead of 1 from the high speed TGV. Anyway, I was too excited to be in Paris to even think about it that time. One very funny memory was that of seeing the communication tower from the train and looking at Prathamesh with innocent eyes yelling and inquiring, “ Is that Eiffel?” and I really meant to ask it with all sincerity and Prathamesh just shrugged me off saying NO! Well, Prathamesh is a lucky ass. You see, he has been to Europe before thanks to DAAD. His love for Germany is absolute and he had been to Paris. I mean come on! At the age of 22 he was visiting Europe twice with his own money?! Very few people I presume on this list in the world!

Paris!! I mean what can I say about this city which hasn’t been said before?! We definitely saw a lot and took a lot more pictures which will be a good reminder of the things we visited. I will mention those which are the most fondly remembered. The most striking memory of Paris was seeing the Eiffel tower from the metro window. It was the most unexpected sudden flash of the tower beaming in yellowish orange in the night. That will be a long lasting memory. I obviously went much more close to the Eiffel than the scene I saw from the metro however the surprise of viewing the tower had made me exclaim “Woah” even in the metro. The French easily figured we are the usual Paris tourists and were too busy in their own life fatigued by the awesomeness of Eiffel to even bother looking outside. Generally speaking after using the metros and public transport of Paris it was easy to realize it’s a fast city. It’s "know or go" here and that is how speaking in French becomes so important. The lifestyle is so fast! The stations are so intricately connected and it’s super complicated. You need to be young to be in a city like this. I had felt this in Seoul after the rustic life of Daejeon but it wasn’t even half of what I felt about Paris as compared to Nantes. It can suck up all energy you have, I bet! Another amazing memory of Paris is Berthillon Ice cream shop and the salted caramel ice cream suggested by a kind Srilankan guy! I mean cummon! It was fantastic. I couldn’t even find that taste in the Gelatos of Italy but we will come to that later. Salted Caramel! I had never thought there could be salt in an ice cream and it could taste so incredibly good! What an amazing time sitting on the banks of Seine River and enjoying an ice cream so awesome in such a chilly weather. Priceless! Then comes the obvious Mona Lisa ma’am and Louvre museum. The ability to see Eiffel tower in the background while hopping around the city is such an amazing feeling. I don’t know how but it was titillating. Rightly called the city of love! Another important highlight was Disneyland! It made me realize how much less of a kid I was now. I wasn’t that crazy as I expected to be while seeing Disneyland. I was sure happy to finally see it but that happiness which bubbled in me thinking about Disneyland when I was a kid was lost somewhere in the process of growing up. I always thought I could be rebellious enough to not let that child in me fade away but alas! We grow and bang ourselves under the speeding truck called maturity on the highway of life. 

Nevertheless, it was a brilliant day spent and that too free of cost thanks to Prathamesh’s landlord’s (who is also a professor) daughter, Mathilda who worked there. 60 Euro ticket for free! I thank Prathamesh for that. He has proved to be more advantageous and helpful as an acquaintance than many of the so called friends in my life. Acquaintance! It’s no longer a word valid between Prathamesh and me now. He is definitely a good friend. A rather quiet friend of mine (probably because I speak so much I never allow him to speak) but a good “hooman” being. [A joke which only both of us will understand] Overall, it was two very exhaustive and rejuvenating days at the same time. It was a difficult feeling to sink in that I was in Paris. I could probably write a whole new blog about the feelings and experience of the Eiffel tower. To sum it up, one needs to visit the top of Eiffel tower. As a student probably climb up and feel exhausted but thrilled. As a mechanical engineer it was beautiful to see how a 3D truss could look so beautiful in real and become much more than just a truss! I will run out of words to mention beautiful in different ways and that’s what it felt when I looked at the Eiffel tower. With bidding good bye to Paris through Louvre in the night and it’s stunning beauty and of course having salted caramel once again on day#2 we were ready to board the overnight train to Cannes!

To be continued….