 The UK experience-1
 I enjoy travelling for two reasons - seeing places and meeting people through which one tends to learn a lot. At the same time, call it an idiosyncrasy or foolishness, I am against visiting the same place, be it in India or abroad, a second time. In spite of my resolve, I found myself along with my husband on board at 1.20 p.m. jetting to the capital of theUK during June-end. The vegetarian lunch served onboard was quite good except for the parathas which required an extra effort to chew. The evening snack, which looked like a stuffed dosa with a liberal paneer and salad filling, was piping hot and as I found it too tempting to resist, dug into it straightaway, but soon realised I was eating only the stuffing because the outer covering was stuck to the foil and refused to yield either to the fork or the human hand!
Landing at Heathrow at 6 p.m.( London time) after a journey of eight-and-a-half hours, we made our way towards the emigration and were shocked to see the place jam-packed, comprising mostly Asians, a majority of whom were Indians (I remember there wasn’t half the number when we visited London 10 years ago). We learnt it was a familiar scene on Friday evening as it was the weekend. It took us nearly two hours to get through emigration. It was amusing to hear a young school girl, who seemed to be getting impatient and restless, say to her mother, “Mummy, if you were the Prime Minister, they would have let us go without all this waiting.”
Once we were through the process and emerged after collecting our baggage ,(I wonder why the board pointing to the direction of baggage claim reads ‘baggage reclaim’) the sight of my gleaming niece waving to us came as a great relief .(Let me add, its always nice to be received at the airport by your hosts).
We reached Reading, a county in London, in a little more than an hour and found bright sunlight flooding into the house even though it was nearly 10 in the night, a time when most Chennaivasis would have had dinner and been ready to hit the bed.
 The next morning we drove to the Swaminarayan temple in Neasdon which is a must-see for all those who visit London. Its sheer magnificence from outside takes your breath away and this marble and stone structure is equally awesome once you enter the spacious complex.
We found the shrines consisted of idols of Lord Ganesha and Lord Hanuman , Lord Rama and Sita, Shiva and Parvathi, Radha and Krishna, besides that of Swaminarayan. The idols are beautifully decked in milky white clothes with embellishments giving that richness. I noticed that the faces of Sita and Parvathi looked identical. Surprisingly, there were table fans in all the shrines. (London homes never had a single fan earlier and people there seem to maintain a status quo even today and manage without one when summer is at its peak.)
The deities in the mandir remind one of the Swaminarayan temple in Ahmedabad. Absolute silence is maintained inside the temple. A short video presentation takes you on a journey commencing from the time the idea of building this temple was conceived to the time of completion of the project.
We drove to Oxford University from there but were disappointed to find the last park-and-see bus whizzing past us.
As we were on our way to the British Museum in Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, we noticed milling crowds were gathering at the Buckingham Palace grounds and the cabbie said they were all waiting to watch the changing of guards. Since we too did not wish to miss the spectacle we terminated the cab at this point and rushed to take a place in the crowd to watch the detachment of the Queen's foot guards march to appropriate martial music{I managed to click a photo or two to capture the ceremony in progress).
We visited The British Museum, established in 1753, which is now home to over six million artifacts, ranging from small archeological to massive objects from past and contemporary cultures. It has some 80 galleries which are organised by geography, history and theme and we realised a single visit was not sufficient to cover all of them.
As we entered the complex we found the Tree of Life from Africa with a monkey climbing on it (it is the second season of Africa at the British Museum) facing us and a cute marble statue of a youth on horseback with a caption - from Rome, perhaps 1st century AD on the right.
After watching the show ‘Mummy: The inside story in 3D’ (with special glasses given to view it) we were tempted to see mummy displays in the Roxie Walker Galleries of Egyptian funerary archeology on one of the upper floors of the museum. There were several mummies displayed from different countries. Room 61 gives an introduction to ancient Egypt. We were fascinated by the naturally preserved body of a man in a reconstructed grave pit placed in a glass case along with a selection of typical grave goods of the time. Our heart missed a beat when we read what was written at the bottom of the small board - Late Pre dynastic, Naqada 11 about 3400 BC.
The UK
Experience -2
The
UK Experience -3
(To be continued)
N Meera Raghavendra Rao
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