My Travel Adventures

This weekend, I visited my friend Yang in Singapore. My Friday night flight had a two-hour delay because of bad weather coupled with Lion Air’s inexplicable decision to begin refuelling only after everyone had boarded. These unfortunate circumstances have added to my ever-deepening dislike of Lion Air for imposing a ban on the use of all electronics during take-off and landings (regardless of whether they are in flight mode) and for its strict policy of “no outside food.” To this I add the fact that I was not able to check-in online for my flight from Bangkok to Singapore, but I was able to check-in for my flight back with a different airline. This may not have even been Lion Air’s fault but at this point I am not exactly primed to be understanding.  

The second day of my weekend in Emilia-Romagna began with a quick breakfast at Bologna’s main train station. It was my first time eating a sfogliatella and I have to say, I really enjoyed the experience. We arrived in Ravenna a little after nine o’clock. As we soon realised, this was too late. Ravenna is a town where many attractions have a limited capacity and timed entrances. We spent the rest of the day trying to outrun the hordes of senior tour groups that had descended upon the city for the sunny weekend.

I woke up on the last day of this intense trip feeling quite sluggish, but the weather was too nice to slack off. I packed up my bag one last time and went out, basically repeating yesterday’s circuit around central Copenhagen. This time, I spent longer checking out the spiralling roof of the Stock Exchange building: upon closer inspection, it is made of the intertwining tails of several dragons. I also briefly stopped by the Botanic Gardens, which were free to enter but were undergoing major reconstruction. The entire northeastern side was closed off to visitors, and what remained was a short loop between the Palm House and the lake.

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...