Travelogue - UK - 1

Travel bug was injected into my system at a very early age. Transfers were part and parcel of my father's job and he never missed an opportunity to visit new places. And being a family man, we always travelled with him. Since my birth we shifted from Bombay, Hyderabad, Chandigarh, Bhubaneswar, Guwahati, Hyderabad and back to Mumbai. And we never failed to visit all places of interest in and around the place of stay.

After marriage, I managed to pass the bug to my husband. Willingly or unwillingly he obliged to my demands for travelling and visiting new places. Here I would like to share some of our experiences. As is evident in the title, there are many such anecdotes I would like to share and instead of boring you with one long monologue, I will serve it bits and pieces.

First stop UK, London. London is a nice place except for the weather. For a major part of the year, it is very chilly and windy. Whenever the mercury touches 20 degree C, it is considered to be hot and people used to remark that it must be like back in India. When I tell them that it was very pleasant compared to the normal temperatures in India, they would be surprised and wondered how we could work in those conditions!

Much more to come later.....

I longed to see the Buckingham Palace but it does not look like a palace at all. Of course, our image of a palace is conditioned by the many Indian palaces we got to see with lavish lawns, spacious durbar halls, intricate carvings etc. The Palace is open to visitors from July to September when the Queen takes up her summer residence at Windsor. The interiors are rearranged to facilitate visitor movement. But all we got to see are the state rooms only - the personal quarters are off limits. Other interesting places in London are - Trafalgar Square with Nelson’s Column and pigeons all over. Big Ben (not so big) Westminster abbey (that was beautiful), London Bridge over River Thames (it was too good for words) and Hyde Park.

Our next stop was at Greenwich to see the Royal Observatory, with all its old time telescopes and other machines and the Royal Maritime Museum, where we got a hands-on-experience of how it feels to be inside a submarine. There were computer simulated fights where one could give orders to fire and all that stuff. I still remember the big expanse of green and the loitering one can do there. Of course this was before millennium, when all the rides and other stuff got installed.