This city was going to be all about people for us. We decided to catch up with friends and family here and experience London differently this time around.
We picked two B&Bs in different neighbourhoods of this big city and spent two days each in them.
We spent time with friends Madhu and Santosh on Christmas eve and another evening. We
enjoyed meeting a couple of their friends and also enjoyed watching them open their gifts to each other. We were supposed to judge which one was a better gift (the sooper dooper Sony music system with Wireless LAN or one 2 hour airplane lesson).
We also met with Hari's cousin Rama who Hari hadnt met in a while and I was meeting for the first time. She treated us to a hearty meal in true Indian fashion. We shamelessly lapped it up of course, blaming it on the fact that we had been surviving on bread, cheese and occassional potatoes over the previous 32 days of European travel.
We then headed out to lovely little town of Cambridge to meet Hari's best friend from his childhood days - Ferzina. It was only a 45 minute train ride and at the end of it we were in this quaint little town of academics and tourists and wanna-be acedemics. Cambridge is a city on the river Cam. The river Cam also has many punts (row boats) on which the punter would stand and row scores of tourists and parents of Cambridge students giving them tidbits of history and trivia about Cambridge.
Cambridge university (we learned from Ferzina ) consists of many colleges and when you apply for admission, you would apply to the university and could get admitted to any one of the colleges. We also heard that some colleges have loads of money (Trinity college) and then there are others that are not as loaded and can be bought over or acquired. So if you are interested in having a Cambridge college named after you, there is still hope.
We had an awesome lunch by the river Cam in a local pub and walked around town the rest of the afternoon. Later in the evening, we went back to Ferzina's college (New Hall) and checked out the computer labs (geeks!!) and then headed back and watched "Bowling for Columbine" together.
We had a great time there. The next morning we were on our way back to London. We met with some very dear family friends of ours in London on Christmas day. Christmas in London is so not like what one would expect. There is no-one on the streets. Everything is dead quiet. Shops, restaurants, movie theatres, any and all establishments are closed.
We walked a lot through quiet London that day. Between lunch at a Indian restaurant and dinner at a local pub catering to lost souls such as ourselves, we were taken care off..
We reflected as to how lucky we were to have been able to travel for 38 days in Europe.
We had each other to share it with and we would never forget the precious memories we had made for ourselves in Europe.
We drank to all this on Christmas night (I drank diet coke and Hari drank warm water as he was battling a cough but we drank to the night alrite!)
The next morning - on boxing day (this is what 26th Dec came to be known in UK as it was historically the day people would box up food to put away for the cold winter) we headed back to Fontainebleau via Paris (on the Eurostar train).
Our vacation had come to an end but life in France for a year at MBA school was a dream vacation in itself.. we drove back looking forward to the year to come..
Photos of France and England
http://www.ofoto.com/I.jsp?c=35mf8y.b9fllgsr&x=0&y=3i0j8e
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