Through a haze

I do not intend to let the memories of my 5 days in Paris fade...so instead of the usual snippets, I have endeavoured to write as much as I recall. Love locks on Pont Neuf #Day 1 Alain, my AirBnB host, had kindly offered to pick me up from CDG airport and escort me home. It was an offer which I accepted with alacrity. I worried that no SIM card and maybe no wi-fi would pose a problem with me meeting him at the vast city of an airport that is Charles de Gaulle. But lo and behold, there was that familiar face (from his Airbnb profile photo) right at the arrivals gate through which I made my exit. Introductions over, I told him that I speak a smattering of French and he was overjoyed by this revelation...and there we were....an Indian girl with her luggage and an elderly balding bespectacled French gent in a red coat walking and talking away. A bit of hilarity ensued as we boarded some wrong trains that would not ply because of technical issues. I think we got off three conse...

When you open up a room in your home to complete strangers you automatically open up your world to new experiences and myriad stories.  Rather than rely on my memory I decided to chronicle these experiences in this blog. There is something inescapably similar amongst solo travellers....they are all trying to find something that they could not in their homeland.  Our first guest was a half-French half-Chinese lady who had had multiple breakups and had landed up with a man old enough to be her father. She seemed to be in search of her own true self. She was in town to interview the founder of an NGO....so moved was she by his story. Talking to her I discovered a lost soul desperately trying to make meaning of whatever she knows. We also had the good fortune to host a Scottish journalist in town for the football world cup, who filed copies late into the night and then rushed to attend the day's matches. Friendly and open, his reviews of the stay mention the home food and the ...