A weekend in London

This has been a very very long weekend for Mr.R. He has the weekends off, Monday was a bank holiday and Tuesday was his weekly off, so four days in a row! (This holiday is a long never ending weekend for me!) We pondered very long about how to spend this weekend oscillating between going to the Lake District or just pottering about London, and ended up choosing London as this was my first time here and seemed like a more sensible option. But the Lake District is definitely on the must-see list, perhaps sometime other time when I’m here again.

Anyway, we’ve spent the past four days in London and here’s the report. Read on if you have nothing better to do :)

We left on Saturday, reached our place of stay at about noon, had a quick lunch and then hopped on to Westminster where we looked into the Cabinet War Rooms (CWR) – a most fascinating secret underground set of rooms that were revealed to the public in 2003 for the first time. The rooms became operational in August 1939, one week before WWII began, in a former government storage basement. In the 21 cramped rooms, the most senior figures of British govt. and its armed forces worked, slept and survived the air attacks on London during the War. The rooms have been kept exactly the way they were before the lights were finally extinguished after six years of war. I loved the war they preserved the stuff from the 40s, right down to the notebooks, letters, crockery and voice recordings. As the CWR is underground, one can get a feel of what it must have been like in those days – constant sirens in the background and other effects only serve to enhance the feeling. I also enjoyed reading the original letters and other notes written during the war. Most of it was well explained and cataloged. The website is http://www.iwm.org.uk/ for anybody interested in learning more.

Sunday began with a lovely sunny morning. We wondered whether to make a day trip to New Forest or Cambridge. Fate decided for us because the train to New Forest pulled out of the station as we reached and the next was 90 mins later, so Cambridge it was. We landed at the station after a minor adventure – the train driver took the train onto another track and not onto the platform where he was supposed to; had to do the train version of a “ 3 point turn” as someone put it, before we could alight. That done, Mr.R and I decided to have an adventure and hired cycles. I was being my usual over-confident self, considering that I haven’t cycled in a loooong time :) But as they say, you never forget cycling and swimming – I believed in that and off we went, me wobbling along and Mr.R constantly worrying (I’m sure) that I was either going to knock into someone or vice-versa. In the end, we survived my cycling skills and had a great time riding along the streets, looking out for traffic and generally having a blast. Now that we had invigorated ourselves with risking our lives, we decided it was time to SEE stuff instead of just taking every turn that came along and hopped on to a sightseeing bus which took us around. Cambridge is a university town and not a university by itself as we think. There are several different colleges around town including Trinity, St.John’s, Christ College, Darwin College, Queens College etc etc.

That done,we came back to London just in time to get tickets to a delightful show of Singing in the rain at Sadler’s Wells, which I thoroughly enjoyed! That was really good fun and I’m glad Mr.R thought of it!

Monday morning we hopped to the Imperial War Museum which was in our backyard all this time. This museum has seven floors of displays and exhibitions which tell the story of conflict in the front line and on British soil from WWI to the present day. Mr.R and I dropped into see just two exhibitions : D-Day exhibition and The Holocaust exhibition. The D-Day exhibition commerated the 60th anniversary of the “biggest and most complex combined operation in history”. Very well documented.

The next one was the exhibition on the Holocaust which documented how the Jews were systematically exterminated during the Nazi regime. Anti-Semite feelings were prevalent from as far as the 12th century or before. This was a heart breaking exhibition – one that leaves you disturbed and wondering about what kind of person or people would feel that hatred or revulsion to another member of the human race and suddenly, I know what they mean because a lot of us in Mumbai feel the same way about the “encroachers from the North – the Biharis, the UPwallahs, the Dilli-ites”. Hitler once said “This struggle is one of ideologies and radical differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented unmerciful and unrelenting harshness”. There are days indeed when many of us have either felt or expressed similar feelings towards our country-men and have not felt a twinge of conscience somewhere…. Are we following in Adolf’s path?

Anyway, onto more pleasant things. Mr.R and I then spent the rest of the day sightseeing - Mr.R patiently seeing the sights all over again for my benefit and being nice about it. Sitting in a tour bus and going around the city can be quite tiring by itself – there’s just SO much to take in and see – it boggles the mind! We ended the evening with a concert at the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall : The Oslo Philhamornic Orchestra conducted by the famous Andre Previn, now aged, but still amazing to watch. I enjoyed most of the concert, but Mr.R to my right and this old white man on my left enjoyed it more because they could make sense of some of the more “difficult” pieces. During the interval, this old man and I got a-talking and it turned out that he had been to India recently – Mumbai and South India mainly – we got talking about my trip and what we had been upto. Mr.R came back with ice-cream and they got into a discussion about the concert. The interval ended and I enjoyed the second half more than the first, I think – it was quite dramatic! After the concert, this old man whispers into my ear that if we’d come out to his car, he has a book for us which he’d like to give us. We tagged along wondering what was coming and he presented us with a wonderful book about the Royal Albert Hall edited by himself! He said that this was our wedding present from him and it was really quite a surprise for us! Mr.R mumbled later that perhaps it was my charm that did the trick as no-one gives him gifts when he’s alone, but I ignored that! A nice end to a lovely day, indeed.

Our last day in London (for the moment!) began with a River Cruise along the Thames, which took longer than expected. We hopped off at some point and went on the London Eye, an amazing contraption that’s like a giant wheel from where you can see all over London. The afternoon was spent at the Science Museum, where Mr.R was looking for eclipse-viewers but we couldn’t find any at the museum shop nor at the Natural History Museum. I’ve been instructed to get some X-rays on my next trip here for the purpose. If any of you know where to get a eclipse-viewer, please let us know!

That was about it – an exciting weekend, not too rushed, lots of walking and assimilating. I enjoyed myself thoroughly and I hoped Mr.R did too. We left the rest of the sights for another weekend. Hope all of you are enjoying your cities as much as Londoners seem to enjoy theirs. I only wish we could make Mumbai a tourists paradise – organized, streamlined and easy to navigate. Anybody in the Tourism industry interested in some good ideas, get in touch! Bye for now.