Profiad atgofio

Well here is my latest update from the kingdom. Had been to Wales during the bank holiday weekend and here are some photos

This one is a wonderful photo of ME (the back ground is the Cardiff Castle by the way)

The second one is again a beautiful snap which shows me standing tall and handsome (if you want to know the castle behind is the Caerphilly castle)

On top of the Brecon Beacons which is the 2nd largest peak in Wales.

Well you can see that each photo depicts how handsome and wonderful I am . Yeah and the scenery is also good !!

Things to do in wales : The major thing to do in wales is Walking. Yes its walking..in fact the tourism board of wales rates this as the top most thing to do (as if nobody walks in any other places). We walked a lot and lot.

The Brecon Beacons hike was a long walk which took us over two hills and back down again. During the walk my eyes were sending messages like 'wow !! look at the view'' to my brain, but my legs were like 'screw the view, if you don't stop now, I am gonna take you down the cliff".

To sum up it was a kind of hike where you curse the road, your body for not being fit, the tour guide who told that it'll be a great experience while walking. But afterwards sitting the room with a drink in your hand boast of how good the trail was, how you never felt tired and never stopped once till you reached the peak (yes, you never stopped once, but a lot of times)

The land scape of Wales is so exciting and beautiful with grass, sheeps, conifers, sheeps, long roads, sheeps and last but not the least sheeps.
Sheeps probably form up to 80% of Wales population and then Cows and then tourists. Probably you could find trace amounts of native Welsh population too. The sheeps stay on the hills 24 hrs and all they do is eat and pose for photos.

The beaches are good of course. People come and sleep in beaches to get tanned. We cannot hope the other way round so we just fooled around taking in the scenes and got more darker.

The native language of Wales is Welsh. Its a curious language and completely different from from English. A four letter word in english becomes a 2 lines of letters in Welsh. They do have big boards in Wales.

We stayed in a youth hostel in the remotest part of Wales, which is largely populated by ..yes sheeps.The nearest house was 3 miles away and nearest phone 10 miles. I could say it was a great place to stay, if I forget the fact that there was only one bathroom for 15 guys and the hot water system was not working. The only consolation was that there were some Australian girls along with us and our eyes had a easy time compared to our legs.

Food: Well I suppose the welsh and the Brits have a wonderful cuisine of their own. But please someone show it to me.All I had during the trip was Mashed potatoes, baked Potatoes, Baked beans, Potatoes, burgers, Potatoes. All I can say is my eyes were luckier than any other organs in my body.

Some observations:

1. People here go for vacations to get away from all the tensions of the city and be part of nature and to get rejuvenated. Once they reach the spot, they pitch up tents which I must say in some cases are bigger than a one room house. I saw a variety of tents, 2bhk, 3bhk, tents with compounds, verandas, balconies...whew the Brits know how to holiday. All they do is sit beside the tent, eat and sleep.

2. There is another group which is the extreme. They can't sleep if they don't do a potentially life threatening act for the day. People who climb mountains without safety gears (in fact at one of the places, one climber fell from about 100 feet and a rescue helicopter had to come in.We were standing there and looking at the rescue with thoughts of going back home and lie down, some other climbers who stood with us looking, just went looking for higher cliffs to fall down from.)

Then there are people who run and cycle down from steep cliffs. These are people who are out there to disprove Newton's laws of motion and gravitation. They don't believe in Gravity, Inertia. But the earth believes in them and We got to see a lot of human shaped marks at the end of the cliffs. Well I am exaggerating a bit, but nevertheless you must be crazy to do all these things.

Families who come for a hike. Kids who can barely walk, kids in prams, kids not even couple of month old. People bring all of them for trekking and hiking and it was a fascinating scene to see where a father and mother with four kids 3 of them toddlers and one still few months old, climbing a steep cliff, which even our tour guide told not to climb (on a side note I did climb down that cliff, which goes to show that, I am irresponsible and don't know whats good for me). I liked the fact that people here allow their kids to run, jump around, even at the risk of they hurting themselves, which we cannot hope to happen in India(Imagine you telling your mother that you will take your 2 month old kid for a trekking trip !!!)

All in all a very good trip where in I can say that I was not tired and did not stop anywhere to rest.

Well that's it for now, thanks for accompanying me in this rant.

PS: There is been a tube strike (i.e the metro)(yes people strike here too) in London for past few days and the commuting here is no different than commuting in BMTC only dangling foot board is not allowed.

Another amusing thing is one of my room mate was bickering about the fact that it takes 25 mins to reach office from home. For a person who spent minimum 2 hrs to reach office, this sounded insane, My only complaint is I am not able to read books during travel, which I used to do back at home.

By the way for those who are wondering what the title means , its 'Experience to remember' in Welsh.