Continuing the post about our UK Experience. Thinking of typing this post in the format similar to our 16 Marks essay type answer with sub headings. Let’s see how it goes… Before starting the subheadings, I would like to give some info about our city Milton Keyenes.It’s a beautiful, less populated and a small city in Buckinghamshire County/State. (Mostly the state names in UK (may be all states I dunno) ends with the word shire!)The city is only 42 years old. So it’s a well planned one. The main recreation centers here are MK Center and the Xscape (which takes 10 mins to reach on foot from our apartment…) and Willen Lake...MK Center is solely a shopping mall and Xscape has skiing, theaters and shops as well. Our week end spot is mostly Xscape and our destination there is always theater and sometimes KFC.The other popular place is the, “Open Market” which is a mélange of petty shops and kai yendhi bhavans…Its opposite to Xscape and near MK center. Why I call it as mélange is that, the shop owners are from different parts of the globe..I mean to say, u will get any kind of grocery, food there .be it Indian, Chinese ,Sri Lankan ,Polish etc…Our favorite places in Open Market are an Indian Grocery shop and Idly shop. Mostly we have our breakfast on Saturdays in that idly shop.
The People:
The kind of patience people here show esp while driving, is unbelievable and commendable. Probably because of the strict laws...But still, abiding the laws and making it executable is praiseworthy. The next thing is the way they handle people .Smile defeats anger always … The other side of the coin…May be for me, it’s the other side and not for British…I mean the core culture, I am not much comfortable with that. Obviously Opinion Differs…
Our Oxford Trip:
Selva planned a trip to Oxfrod.He got a rental car. Believe me he is good at driving despite the fact he (we?) met with few accidents while driving his two wheeler at Chennai. It’s about an one and half hours journey. Throughout the journey I was instructing him to take the proper right and left turns. And I was instructed by the GPS navigation system named TOM TOM.I have never seen it before. Heard of it though. ..The whole day my hero was that lil TOM TOM...It is incredible…Me and Selva once went to a Canon show room in Nungambakkam… That was our first time to reach Nungambakkam from T Nagar. We would have seeked the help of at least twenty people to locate the show room. But this TOM TOM helped us reaching our destination without the help of even a single soul.I should pen here about the way the cities are connected in UK. Each and every city is connected to the rest of the cities through round abouts.The round about will have four entries/exits which connects the cities. This format is seen even in roads connecting streets within the city. Inspite of researching the tourist locations from the Google maps the previous day, we managed to see only one place at Oxford. It’s none other than the Oxford Church.
Birmingham Trip:
Selva’s friends suggested us to visit Lord Venkateshwara Temple at Birmingham. Again with the help of the tiny hero TOM TOM, we reached Birmingham, which takes about one and half hours from MK.The temple looked so good. For the first time in life, I was able to see Lord Venky for about 30 mins continuously minus the crowd standing in a long queue. (When I was doing my fifth standard, I remember standing for about 12 hours just to visit Lord Venky for only One minute at Tirupathi!!!)After having Channa Batura in a shop inside the temple run by North Indians, we left the temple and visited the Sea World. That was really amazing. For the first time I saw umpteen varieties of fishes. They were brought from different part of the world. The funny part was a 4D film about the Sea Lives.They had made it so live by vibrating the chair and splashing water when a huge fish appears on the screen. Cool….
London Trip:
Our next destination was London…This time we planned it so carefully so that we can see more places. I have a childhood friend Vinodh in London. So asked his advice regarding the tourist spots in London.Everytime we plan with the help of google maps, but somehow we don see all the places …It happened this time too even after meticulous prep. Parking space hunting occupies most of the time. It is a real bugging thing. Google Maps sometimes does not have an updated one. The heavy rain added fuel to flames. We had planned to visit Buckingham Palace, Big Ben,a Park near Big Ben,Madamme Tussauds and London Eye. We reached London by 10 am. But till 12 am we were only finding the parking area. London is a busy and populated city so it was very difficult to find one. So we had to change our plans and decided to visit only Madamme Tussauds and if Possible London Eye.We did manage to visit both somehow. It was a Long queue in which we had to stand for about one hour to buy tickets.I forgot to mention two things that made our trip different this time. First thing, Selva’s friend Rageeth accompanied us and the next thing is that we took Canon 500D Digital SLR camera with us. We had bought that the previous day. That was Selva’s dream. We have a digi Cam but we din bring it here as athai and mama may need it and Selva wanted to buy this digital SLR here in UK so we managed the previous trips with our Mobiles to take snaps. This time photos came out very well.Madamme Tussauds, as we all know has statues of Celebrities made of Wax. We took photographs with Gandhiji,Ash,Big B,Salman.Tendulkar and the list goes on….After the visit I felt, its quiet worth standing in the queue for one hour…From there we took a taxi to London Eye as we din want to take our car and struggle with the parking space hunting..London Eye is a kind of big giant wheel but the difference is that the capsules are closed and it is really big. The purpose of this spot is to have a look at the London City. So we saw the Big Ben too from the London Eye. Big Ben is a Historical tower with a clock. Thank god we had a good camera to take snaps from great altitudes. That finished our London Trip.
This essay type answer ends here. As winter has started we don’t know how far we can arrange for trips for the next few months but anyways Xscape is always there..So no worries…Thanks for ur time as i know its a very lengthy post..
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