My Travel Adventures

The short stretch of the Danube between Bratislava and Vienna is perhaps one of the most historically significant parts of Central Europe. Littered with Roman settlements, medieval castles, and baroque palaces, it attracts hordes of tourists every summer, a fact discernible by the sheer number of hotels in unremarkable towns.

Since I failed to enter the Blue Church on the previous day, I woke up at 6:00 the next morning to visit during the narrow slot when the church is open. From Monday to Saturday, its hours are 6:30-7:30 and 17:30-19:00, which leaves very little time for flexibility (or sleep). Skipping breakfast, I arrived at the church slowly after opening hours and took pictures as the congregation slowly trickled in.

As I wrote in my last post, I keep a mental list of places that I’ve never visited despite their proximity to Prague. Until the end of this year, this list somehow included Bratislava, the capital of our sister nation, the coronation city of Hungarian kings, and the first foreign destination of all Czech presidents.

I have a mental list of places which, despite and because of their proximity to Prague, I have never visited. Dresden was on the top of that list for a long time, as I had even spent an entire two months in Berlin without ever stopping by.

I returned to the Czech Republic on the 12 th of December, having just narrowly avoided the complete societal collapse that befell England this winter. Although both my train ride to the airport and flight home were delayed, real disaster only struck once I was safely at home, with heavy snowfall causing various modes of transportation to be cancelled and car crashes to litter English roads.

Among the many reasons it is good to have friends is they help you get out of your own head and push you to do new things when you get stuck in a rut. A few weeks back, my course mate Sophie suggested we visit London to see an opera, with Puccini’s Tosca falling on a particularly opportune day.

As the last week of school drew to a close, I let myself go. I had submitted my applications and finished my classes, so now was the time to have fun and catch up with friends. Not that I hadn’t seen them at all during term time, but certainly not as much as I would have liked to. On Friday, a few of us visited a Slovak restaurant in Cowley, and at a subsequent get-together at Saint Cross, I made plans with my friend Johnny to make a trip the following day. We departed for Gloucester on Saturday morning, changing trains at Didcot Parkway. Johnny’s foresight guaranteed us an exciting journey: we watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on his iPad, though I am not sure what was more action-packed – the film itself or my frantic scanning of the Chinese subtitles. At Didcot, we got so engrossed that we almost missed our connection. Gloucester’s major attraction is its cathedral, an establishment that dates to the seventh century but whose modern contours were definitively drawn in the f...

Little photographic evidence exists of my second Michaelmas term at Oxford, for it was a dark time. Both my electives for the entire year took place this term, on top of which I had to complete my PhD applications. Autumn’s only saving grace was that, by a massive stroke of luck, one of my electives clashed with a course seminar that I consequently – and with sorrows overflowing – had to forego.

There were still two weeks to kill before I could move back into my accommodation at Oxford, and I spent them at the house of two friends in Hampton in Arden, a quaint village just outside Birmingham. Until writing this blog post, I often wondered but never bothered to find out what exactly an Arden is and why anyone would want to build a Hampton there. It turns out Arden was once a large forest in Warwickshire that gradually gave way to settlements like Birmingham, Coventry, and Stratford-upon-Avon. It is thought the word would have meant something like “highland” in Brythonic (meanwhile, the name “Hampton” derives from the very pedestrian words “home” and “town”).

A few days in bright and hot California made my return to Britain very pleasant. No longer would I have to put on sunscreen just to go outside, nor would I have to strategise how to stay in the shade on my walks. It occurs to me, however, that for a country that constantly has to deal with rain, the UK does not do so very well. My bus to Oxford was delayed by a quarter of an hour, and it arrived at least half an hour later than it should have. It reminded me of my arrival in Oxford two months ago, when major delays had been caused by a heatwave. Clearly, the dysfunctionality of UK traffic is chronic, and the weather is just an excuse. Whether it be heat, rain, or snow, there is always some (usually only slightly) inclement weather condition that throws a wrench into theoretically perfect timetables.

There is not much to write about the final day of our road trip except that we have finally made it. At noon, we arrived in Stanford, where Kelly will soon begin her PhD program. Nevertheless, we could not begin her move-in today, as she had to undergo a test for tuberculosis at the university’s clinic. The justification for this requirement continues to baffle me, as the vaccination rate in East Asia is way higher than what America could ever dream of, and Kelly has not even left the country since taking a TB test for her last program. Coupled with some bureaucratic miscommunication, the whole episode threatened to cut our trip short, but things turned out well in the end.

The penultimate day of our journey was more chaotic than we expected. Our use of the words “cursed,” “janky,” and “unhinged” had been high from the beginning but today, it shot through the roof.

Today was a grey day and the first day – barring the morning that followed our exhausting night at the hiker’s lodge in Grand Teton – when I was woken up by my phone’s alarm. For the first time on this trip, it started to feel like autumn; some leaves were changing colour, and some were falling to the ground, while the temperature dipped into coat-wearing territory. At first, I found this change relieving for my arms, which the sun had been roasting every minute they spent extended towards the steering wheel. Throughout the day, however, we would come to ascribe our exceeding weariness to the dreary weather.

Today was our last day with Lekha, and we spent it by performing typical tourist tasks. Ingeniously, Kelly cooked up a plan to take the hotel’s free shuttle to the airport, from which we took the light rail downtown.

We took the day slowly, eating a leisurely breakfast before driving up Hurricane Ridge Road into Olympic National Park. The drive was quite narrow and steep, and the bright sun made every shadow all the more difficult to make out. Confused by the lack of signage, we parked the car short of the Hurricane Hill trailhead, and thus accidentally added a bit of distance to our 3.4-mile hike. It was on this stretch, however, that we spotted two garter snakes. Or rather, it was on this stretch that some members of our party screamed after almost stepping on a snake, which we have since identified as a harmless garter snake from my photos.

Our morning drive westwards from George gave us unparalleled views of Mount Rainier, which floated above the orange plains until we drew closer to the nearby mountain range. We arrived in Seattle before noon. There, we managed to meet one of my friends, who was just about to fly to the East Coast that evening. We walked in one of the parks before dropping him off in the centre and promptly picking up another friend with whom we would spend the next few days.

The crack in our windshield slowly grew as we headed west towards Washington, causing some consternation. When we stopped in Butte to take pictures of Our Lady of the Rockies (the fourth tallest statue in the US), Kelly and I switched, and while I drove, she looked up places where the windshield might be fixed.

We started the day by picnicking at Glacier View Turnout. We began our breakfast outside but found our fingers becoming a little stiff and our bottoms a little cold, so we relocated to the car and tried to not make a mess. For the rest of the morning, we made a loop around Grand Teton, following the 191 northwards, Teton Park Road southwards, and then the 191 again all the way to and through Yellowstone. While we were walking along Jenny Lake, I found a berry that looked like a blueberry and decided to try it. It did not taste like a blueberry, so I thought it better to spit it out. As I would learn the following day, what I had chewed on was actually a huckleberry, so I might as well have swallowed.

The ninth day of our trip was always going to be a long one, as it involved driving across practically the whole of Wyoming. Having retained the half day of extra time that we gained in Nebraska, we already covered part of that journey on the previous day. This meant that we traversed the winding ways of Bighorn National Forest quite early in the morning, only narrowly avoiding a sleepy deer on the side of the road.

The Badlands were the first destination for which we significantly deviated eastwards. Our first stop was unplanned: we saw a giant prairie dog statue off the side of the road and sure enough, it marked a wonderfully bizarre attraction. Despite the many signs warning tourists not to feed the prairie dogs, there seemed to be a tacit understanding between the owners of the ranch and the tourists that this sign would be disobeyed (and indeed, should be disobeyed in order to keep the prairie dogs unafraid of humans and continue generating revenue for the nearby shop). As soon as we pulled up, not only did we see a family blissfully feeding the rodents, but the prairie dogs started to approach us demanding food.

We decided that we would cherish the hour we clawed back by crossing into Mountain Time: instead of adjusting to local time, we stayed on Central Time, making the most of daylight hours by waking up at around six o’clock.

We started our day after eight, exulting in the fact that we would drive westwards with the sun shining on our backs and not in our faces. After making a stop at Starbucks to get Kelly coffee, one more stop to get gas, and yet another stop to buy ourselves a take-away lunch at Panera, our first proper recreational break was at Mushroom Rock State Park. The area is home to three large rocks that have eroded unequally to resemble giant mushrooms, as well as several other interesting geological features. We ate our take-away lunch there, with me alternately scooping and impaling my salad using a knife, as we had only received one set of cutleries.  

We started our day by returning to the Illinois side of Saint Louis to visit the Cahokia Mounds. The weather was beautiful, and we saw many joggers running around, indeed, even up and down the main mound while sweating profusely. The layout of the area reminded me a lot of the layout of typical pre-Columbian Mesoamerican city centres, with their ceremonial squares and surrounding pyramids. It seems almost indubitable to me that much cultural exchange, or an evolution from a common cultural substrate, must have happened to result in such similar city planning. At some point, I ’ll have to do some research on how much has been written about this already.

We enjoyed the day at a leisurely pace, as we had booked the Domes and Dripstones Tour at Mammoth Cave for ten o’clock. This was the earliest time at which the specific tour would take place, and I felt quite partial to it because of how many stalagmites and stalactites we would see (in fact, the tour guide said that the tour would take us past 70% of the stalagmites and stalactites in the entirety of Mammoth Cave).

Rather than me adjusting to American time, our internal clocks decided to play a number on us, and Kelly ended up adjusting to my time instead. Despite having intended to wake up at 6:30, we both woke up at around four (as I believe, to the sound of Kelly gnashing her teeth). With neither of us able to fall back asleep, we decided to get breakfast at six o’clock and start the day early. The experience turned into an adventure when I discovered a pancake machine with buttons and a conveyor belt, at the end of which the finished pancakes flopped out onto a prepared plate. We learned then and there that the future is now.

Kelly and I agreed that we would start the day very early to beat the traffic around Washington. She set her alarm to five o’clock and I, still adjusting from European time, simply woke up at half past three and thanked my body for its obstinacy.

“I hate this road trip already,” sighed Kelly behind the wheel, though I cannot remember why. I must have done one of the many things that have begun to annoy her, such as giggling over the words “Juju Chewbacca”, pensively whispering “sooo desu ne” under my breath, quibbling about the definitions of tangentially mentioned terms, or creatively mishearing things she says. It was day 1 of our long-awaited road trip from Wilmington, Delaware, to San Francisco. Kelly has just finished her second master’s degree at the Winterthur Programme in Delaware, and she is about to begin her history PhD at Stanford – and, perhaps most crucially, she needs to get her car from one coast to the other.

I spent my first day back in the US hanging out with my friend Michael, who has previously appeared on this blog here , here , and here . As he had just arrived from California, we stored his suitcase in my room while we went out to explore the city. Although I have been to New York many times (most often in connection with voting and obtaining visas), there are many places I regret never visiting. Since Michael had no preferences as to what to do and see, I got carte blanche to make up for some of these omissions. We started the day on a spiritual note, visiting Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and the Episcopal Saint Thomas Church. The former struck us with its sheer vastness and atmospheric stained-glass windows. The latter had a sprawling organ, which we heard being played as we entered. We also tried to visit the Central Synagogue, but found it closed due to the pandemic. The only exigent item on my itinerary was to buy a phone plan for my upcoming road trip, the two requirements bei...

The weather gods were kind to me on the day of my journey to New York. The horrible heat that had been plaguing England for the past few days abated, so I was able to maintain some semblance of decorum while lugging my bags to the bus stop at Headington Shops. What God giveth, however, man sometimes taketh away. The appearance of control I had possessed vanished as soon as the bus driver asked me what terminal I was going to. With a distinct air of uncertainty, I suggested terminal five, to which the driver responded, “So you’re flying with British Airways then?” I was not flying with British Airways, so lord knows why I said yes. When I was on the bus, I checked my plane tickets, and they confirmed I was indeed leaving from terminal five, but with American Airlines. Why, then, was the bus driver so sure I was flying with British Airways? I spent the rest of the bus ride fretting about increasingly unlikely scenarios of what might happen once I got to the airport. The matter resolv...

This Saturday, I took the train to London to visit my friend and fellow IR student Yang. When discussing where we might go, she suggested choosing one of two places: Greenwich or Hampstead. It was an easy choice to make. Back in March, a visiting friend introduced me to an app that has information about all the UNESCO world heritage sites and lets the user track how many sites they have been to. Since then, I have used this app to an ungodly extent, letting it dictate many of my preferences for my upcoming US road trip. Anyway, suffice it to say, Greenwich is on the UNESCO list and Hampstead is not.

Towards the end of my summer days at Oxford, I realised I had not taken any pictures or even visited any of the places I had intended to see. I was so engrossed in my thesis that every minute spent doing something else seemed like a waste. Towards the end of the third week, though, the weather became really nice, so I spent one morning and another afternoon simply sightseeing. Maddeningly, perhaps half of the colleges I tried to visit were closed either for graduation or summer school, both of which seem to last the entire season. I had thought summer would be a good time to explore them in peace, but when Oxford is not turning unholy profits on its regular student body, I suppose it must make up for the shortfall somehow.

After spending three weeks at home, I came back to the UK at just about the worst possible time. A day before my flight to Birmingham, I got a notification on my phone saying that my train to Oxford had been cancelled due to the coming heatwave. Rather unhelpfully, the Trainline app did not offer me an immediate refund but graciously offered me the option to take another train – with the next available train leaving more than three hours later. I decided, therefore, to take the bus, which seemed like the smartest option until I considered my cumbersome two pieces of luggage. Still, I did not feel like splurging on a taxi on a day when drivers were likely to hike their prices, so I just got on the plane and hoped for the best.

A few days before I returned to Oxford, my dad and I made one last trip around Bohemia. Our first stop was in Kounov, the fields above which are home to a mysterious collection of stone rows. It is unclear when or why these rows were built, with hypotheses about their use ranging from ancient observatory to new-age boundary stones. The former theory is supported by their apparent alignment with some astronomical phenomena, but the site lacks a regular structure and standardised stone sizes, which are typical of such ‘calendars’ elsewhere.

Caving in before my sister’s foolhardy insistence, I agreed to go on a trip with her on the most inauspicious day possible. The interesting thing about my sister is that somehow, she always finds a weather forecast that says it will be sunny when all other forecasts predict rain. If prompted, she would no doubt be able to find a weather app that would tell us there isn’t a single cloud in the sky during a downpour.

Not long after my solo trip south of Prague, my dad took me to see Kutná Hora, a UNESCO-listed town to the east of the capital. As its name (which roughly translates to Mining Mountain) indicates, Kutná Hora gained prominence and made a fortune thanks to the discovery of silver in the thirteenth century. This fortune, in turn, enabled the financing of some truly impressive architectural projects, among them the Church of Saint Barbara (the patron saint of miners), with its three peaks and prominent pillar frame.

I decided to spend three weeks at home before going back to Oxford. The original hope was that this would provide me with just enough time to enjoy my family’s company without getting tired of it. In reality, by week three, I was already itching to start getting work done, which was simply impossible with so many people around.

I definitely overprepared for my final exam. By the time I sat it, I was exhausted, and I had to resort to copying many of the answers I had written on my mocks. As I was assisting an event at the European Studies Centre in the evening, I could feel an illness coming over me, which would manifest in an incessantly runny nose on the following day. I spent the rest of the week drinking tea every twenty minutes in a desperate attempt to quickly nurse myself back to health. As my tests came back negative, I assume I did not have covid.

Oxford is beautiful in May . The trees  in the parks are all covered in vibrantly green leaves, as of yet untouched by disease and the voracity of insects. So many flowers have bloomed at University Parks, that I can hardly keep track of their names. I have made many walks during the past few weeks, some along the canal, some to Christ Church Meadow, and others still to University Parks.

I did not have much time to explore the environs of Windsor Castle last time I went, and ever since then, I had been planning to make a proper tour of the all the major sights in the area. The opportunity finally presented itself in May, as the weather was very nice, and my housemate Luqman and I were thinking of making another hike.

Ever since I bought my English Heritage pass, I have been looking for ways in which I might be able to make it pay for itself. I even created an Excel spreadsheet to see at what exact point I would break even. Thus, I was elated to find out that English Heritage pass holders receive discounts on exhibitions at the British Museum, which allowed me to add the neat little sum of £ 4.5 to my “Money Saved” column.

We spent the last two days of my friend’s visit in and around Oxford, as we had another mutual friend and his boyfriend fly in from the States. As soon as they arrived early in the afternoon, I took them on a tour of the most picturesque colleges in Oxford, but because I did not have enough time to do my research, I had to make up fake histories and interesting facts about them.

Our last proper day trip during my friend’s visit took us to the Midlands. My friend and I took an early train to Leamington Spa to meet my housemate Harry (who, for the purposes of this blog, chose the epithet “Harry the caper-denier” over much more flattering ones, like “Harry the Tall” and “Harry the rugged-chested”). Harry the caper-denier, so-called because he refuses to believe that capers are anything but olive raisins, picked us up in his car and drove us to the half-an-hour-distant Stratford-upon-Avon.

Having taken my friend to London twice, I found that there were still a few important places we had not seen. Thus, I set aside this Tuesday morning for a speed tour of the city, making sure my friend could get back to Oxford in time for his online meetings. We took a six AM train, which was the cheapest option until half past nine, and arrived at Paddington after seven.

Since my friend only took one week off from work, we had to plan around his US work hours during the second week of his visit. Thus, on Monday, I made sure that our excursion to Windsor would not bring us home any later than five o’clock in the afternoon. The itineraries for subsequent days were even more tight.

We arrived in London late in the morning and headed straight for the British Museum. In preparation for the visit, I made myself a short list of iconic things I really wanted to see: the Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon Marbles, the Hoa Hakananai’a Moai, the Benin Bronzes, the double-headed Aztec serpent, the Sutton Hoo Helmet, and of course an obligatory mummy. We managed to see all of them, taking a short break for lunch and returning once more because of the museum’s sheer vastness.

We reached Dover shortly after sunset on Friday and ate momos at a very nice Nepalese restaurant. Our hotel was also very cosy, which more than made up for the fact that my friend and I had to share a bed. He reminisced about the coffee they served in the morning for many days.

The more logistically complex journey I planned for my friend’s stay took us to Kent. We took the Oxford Tube to London on Friday morning, evading the exorbitant railway prices but getting delayed by bad traffic. We got off at Marble Arch and walked through Hyde Park towards Wellington Arch, where I told my friend about the bizarre history of the Wellington statue that once adorned (or, according to some, defaced) it. It was so big that instead of facing the street that ran through the arch, the statue had to be placed perpendicularly to it.

We arrived at the train station in Salisbury in the evening, so we quickly checked in and ate dinner. As my friend had never been to the UK before, I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to immerse him in the local culture: not only did we have dinner at the local Wetherspoons, we stayed the night in the adjoining King’s Head Inn Wetherspoon. Before going to sleep, we made a quick excursion to Salisbury Cathedral, which was beautifully lit up and peaceful (I resisted a few disgruntled calls to be spontaneous and just walk in any direction for an hour).

Our second UK trip took me and my visiting friend, as well two of my housemates, to Southampton. The weather forecast for the day was grim, and the drizzle that started before noon turned into an intermittently violent downpour that only ended at around four o’clock.

The first day trip on which I took my friend was a visit to Bath and Bristol. We arrived in Bath at the sensible hour of nine o’clock, which – come to think of it – happens to explain the absurd amount of money we paid for the train tickets there. I had reserved tickets to the Roman Baths for 10:15, so we spent a little over an hour simply wandering about the awakening town. Just like every proper spa town, it was bustling with retirees. What is remarkable about Bath is its unified appearance: practically every building in the centre is built of Bath stone, a sandy coloured type of limestone, and has the same grey roof.

I spent the latter half of Hilary Term (the second term at Oxford) eagerly planning and awaiting a visit from a college friend. In the spare time between my having to write essays and complete assignments, I was starring places in google maps, searching for connections on trainline, and studying the histories of the places we would visit. I did, however, have time to do other things as well. For example, my housemates and I visited the Pitt Rivers Museum, a major anthropological and archaeological museum in Oxford. The collection was interesting enough, but the lack of any logical geographic or temporal categorisation nearly drove me up the wall.

My housemate Luqman and I made a trip on the Saturday of February 26 th . Having exchanged a few jokes about walking all the way to Birmingham, we eventually settled on a more modest, 33.69-kilometre roundtrip to and from Abingdon. The first hour or so was idyllic. We passed by blossoming cherry trees and the seemingly infinite stretch of university boathouses as we walked along the Thames in pursuit of the sun. As we left civilisation, however, we found ourselves evading and wading in mud on every corner. By the time we reached Abingdon, not only our shoes but the bottoms of our trousers were a thick brown.

I made a trip with two of my housemates to London on the Saturday of February 12 th . Well, to be precise, I made a trip to the British Library to investigate some documents, and then met up with my friends on Edgware Road. As an aside: the British Library system is terrifyingly efficient. All the books I requested arrived on time and to the right room with only two days of prior notice. When I came to register for a Reader Pass last term, I was done in less than ten minutes. The only complaint I have is that for volumes of, for example, periodicals, the website often does not say how many volumes are in a single book. Thus, as I learned the hard way, one cannot simply write “Please give me all the volumes published between years x and y” but must book every single volume separately. This, of course, means that multiple requests will be cancelled, as there is often no way to tell how many volumes there are per book.

On the Saturday of January 22 nd , I planned a walk to Headington with my housemates to see the famous Headington Shark. Although urban legend has it that the sculpture – a shark apparently crashing through the roof of a local house – was designed to spite local authorities, the reality is somewhat different. Its owner Bill Heine described the artistic intention behind John Buckley’s sculpture in the following way: “The shark was to express someone feeling totally impotent and ripping a hole in their roof out of a sense of impotence and anger and desperation…. It is saying something about CND, nuclear power, Chernobyl and Nagasaki.” The Oxford City Council subsequently attempted to have the shark removed but was defeated when the matter escalated to the central government.

I spent a nice three weeks at home making traditional Christmas sweets and going on walks. Since several of my friends had covid, I saw almost no one, and decided it would be safer that way considering I would have to get back to Oxford for my exams. I made it a resolution for the new term to take a walk every day, which has helped me explore a decent chunk of town around Saint Antony’s. I discovered the western end of University Parks – where I had never been before – as well as the beautiful grounds of Lady Margaret Hall, among others.