Snippets from a traveler’s life

Snippets from a traveler’s life

How best to overcome the fatigue and the tiredness of continuous exams, presentations and report submissions, the sleepless nights and the aftermath?Simple; just take a refreshing sip of lush, green and enchanting England.

As I set out from a sweltering hot day in Paris towards Norwich, I saw the parched French landscape grudgingly give way to the fertile English soil, nurtured by the blood and toil of generations of men. The landscape dotted with teeny tiny houses among vast fields gave way to the hustle bustle of London and then  transformed again to the rolling country side of Norwich. Green, gold and brown seemed to merge in one hue as we continued, ambling through villages and those typical beautifully quaint English cottages one always dreams of having.  Norwich came at last, the light at the end of a very long, albeit beautifully embellished, tunnel. Meeting family is always such a joy and this time was no different. After a sumptuous Mediterranean dinner, we strolled along the trail of gorillas, innovatively painted (some even resemble batman and ironman) admiring the beauty of Norwich as it slumbered.(The painted gorillas represented their not so fortunate real-lifecounter parts becoming endangered by the minute.)

The next day we set off for the town of Bath, where Jane Austen wrote some of her best works and most of England went to, well, take a bath. For it was here that the Romans discovered the healing properties of the hot water springs and decided to make a pomp and show about it by building a public bath. Now when one mentions public baths, one automatically thinks of the unhygienic conditions, where the entire world comes to wash their dirt and sins away. However the Romans were well aware of this fact and set up an elaborate system of purification in place, well before entering the main bath itself so that only once a person was deemed clean enough for the bath could he enter it. A spa, a sauna, numerous dressing rooms and massage rooms were all part of the main structure, and at the helm of it all-the Scared Pool. This was where the hot sulphur springs finally found an outlet for their boiling rage and gushed to the top. And they remain angry and warm to this day-steaming hot and tantalizingly therapeutic (yes we did touch and drink it and yes we do live to tell the tale).  With an elaborate drainage system and brilliant engineering, the Roman baths are a marvel of their age and to this day, even after significant additions by the English kings, survive the blemishes of time.

Bath in itself is a small town with various other attractions, notably the Jane Austen house and the Fashion museum where one can not only see but also get to try on the Victorian dresses for oneself. And after doing so and trying to sashay down the room, we had a new found respect for the women of that epoch who readily underwent this torture for the sake of what fashion deemed as beauty.  Next on the list was the imposing Pulteney bridge sitting atop the gushing waters of the Avon and built on the lines of the locksmith’s bridge in Florence(but that makes for another blog post). Nibbling on the some fresh Italian ice cream seemed like a dream come true on that hot sweltering day(and yes the sun does reveal itself to the people of England) and all this while strolling the by lanes of one of the most scenic cities in the world-Bath.

The following morning, we had another of our childhood fantasies come to life-that of paying a visit to the mysterious stone circle known as the Stonehenge. The way was marked by chalk figures as old as the hills themselves, and the alleged fields marked by crop circles( made by men or otherwise) and the quaint thatched roof cottages of one of the villages. But nothing could have prepared us for the stones themselves, massive, towering, over powering, awe-inspiring and we paused for a minute, overcome with a fatal desire to touch them yet glad of the distance between us and the Stonehenge.  We did not just marvel at the strength of the men who brought them from Wales without modern machines, but also at the architects who conspired with the stars and seasons to overwhelm the common man into believing that it was less of architectural ingenuity and more of a sacred temple for worshipping the forces of nature.

From the ancient we moved to the medieval by shifting base to London and paying a visit to the Westminster Abbey where centuries of men prayed, hoped and dreamed- from royalty to poets like Chaucer, all found their final resting place underneath. From grandiose royal weddings to even more opulent coronations, this abbey really has borne witness to man’s journey through time. For a less romantic version of life, we visited Tower of London, marked by blood and gore in the violent English history. It was in this tower cum hill fort that Sir Isaac Newton lived as the head of the Royal Mint and that Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned.  All of Henry VIII’s wives were also killed here and apparently a man, one of the many bloodthirsty England hung, was hung, drawn and quartered here( from where the expression originates). This is also the resting place of the famous Koh-i-Noor in the queen's crown and the less I say the better. Moving on, next on our list were these interesting fountains which seem to spout out of the ground suddenly and which were quite the rage with people actually bathing in them to take respite from the heat. From then on, we just roamed around near the river banks until we were tired  and/or hungry. It is rather magical to be roaming around, discovering parts of London very different from what one has read about(read Picadilly circus, Buckingham Palace which of course we did see but we enjoyed the parks around rather than the Palace itself). It’s the realization that you don’t want to be a tourist anymore and would rather explore the city for what it is than for what it has to offer.

And thus another beautiful trip to the city of my dreams came to an end. Until next time then!