Summer of 2007, month of June, I and my good friend Shiv made a memorable journey to Paris. It was a crazy bus journey to Paris from London for almost 12-14 hours. We initially enjoyed it as the bus entered the train and train went under water! crossing the English Channel.
The next morning we could see ourselves very tired without sleep. 🙁
Our sole intention of the trip was to capture as many good pictures as possible. Our first stop was Notre Dam. We took few pictures from there and we moved on. After a good lunch, we moved to Tour Eiffel by about 4 pm. Cloudy weather welcomed us. With not much hope to get good pictures we stacked on to Eiffel under shade. However, we had some sunshine for a while which got us this, 
Soon we packed our kits and moved to Arc De Triumphe and Champs-Élysées. Around 10 pm we realised that we still have Loure and ET to capture them under lights. We ran to Loure and got some very good pictures under lights. By then, it was about 130 am in the morning!
Then we ran towards Eiffel to capture some pictures under lights. To our disappointment, the trains heading to Tour Eiffel were closed already. We somehow managed to get to the nearest Tube station to Eiffel. We got out of the tube station, we saw the glittering Eiffel in a long distance. We ran, ran and ran for a long time. With grasping breath, we finally reached Eiffel. It was 3am and glittering lights were embracing the Tower.
Placed our tripods, leveled the cameras, sneaked into the view. Only to see that lights got switched off.. ! 🙁 We looked at each other, had no words to explain our fate. Grimace filled our face like no other pain ever felt. All we got to shoot was this,
The disappointment gloomed for more than 2 years and revenge had to be taken!
The winter of Dec 2009 was the time for it. This time I was well prepared to take a good revenge and forego the disappointment. It was this winter when having only 6 hours time in Paris, I sneaked out in chilly weather of -6 degrees, with my hands and legs struggling to hold up the camera.
The first hour, I travelled from Airport to Main city. Then, I ran and ran for metro tubes and finally reached the Tour Eiffel tube station. One strange thing about her is, ever since I first visited Miss Eiffel in 2005, she has been under repair.. ! This time around it was no different. She was covered in parts in the first two levels and look from beneath was awfully bad.. 🙁
Least I knew, the next two hours of 16th Dec 2009 were to be long remembered in my life. My hands were shivering so much that I couldn hold the camera steady for even a few secs. Somehow managed to click few times.
Thanks to Société nouvelle d’exploitation de la tour Eiffel, who installed the lighting on the tower. They do have a standing order not to display the eiffel tower images with lighting. However, it applies for the commercial use of the photographs and copyright does not seem to exist.
After those two hours in front of Eiffel, I had a good long sleep and by the time I woke up I was slowly landing in Bangalore.