My Travel Adventures

I woke up early in the morning, still a little dazed from jet lag. It was only five o’clock, but Sparsh’s grandfather was already sitting at the dining hall table. Holding a necklace of glass beads in silent reverie, he was facing away from the door and towards the family shrine, a tiled structure set in a niche on the balcony and filled with various plates and other metalware. The lamp was shining, and the incense was already placidly burning away.

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.