P Paris 2024 will be remembered for the summer Olympics where many events were held at exotic locations and many sportspersons achieved stardom. Hephaestus, who made weapons for the Greek gods at Olympus, made one extra javelin for Arshad Nadeem, who hurled it to create a new Olympic Games record. It also brought back memories of a trip my wife and I took a few summers ago when we visited some of these beautiful locations in Paris.
It was a secret trip. Ordinarily, I should not have written about it. But certain things happened apart from surprises that are usual for such trips and we crossed paths with some unforgettable characters in the streets of Brussels and Paris.
Of course, the most amazing of those was Kenny, whom we met not in the street but at the reception desk of a hotel where we checked in in Paris. Meeting him was like experiencing Waterloo in Paris. The plan was to board a train to Paris from Amsterdam; get off at Brussels and make a short day trip to Waterloo; and then continue the journey.
We got off at Brussels Central Station as planned and discovered that Abbasi was not there to receive us. We explored the grand old building of the railway station and soon realised that the culprit was Victor Horta, the architect who designed the Central Station in 1910. The project was delayed by the outbreak of the two World Wars and completed in 1952, when the Central Station joined the North and South railway stations of Brussels.
The city now had three railway station.