My Magical Europe Trip

Destination Milan

As I handed over my project at work to another writer on Thursday, September 11, 2009, and tied up other loose ends, I felt an overwhelming sense of exhaustion. I couldn’t believe that in a few hours from then (at the stroke of midnight, actually), I would be at the airport with my mom waiting to head off on a whirlwind tour of Europe for 11 days.

I battled sleep at the Chennai airport watching the other travelers and killing time. Our flight was scheduled for departure at the ungodly hour of 4.15 am. Numerous caffeine fixes later, I heard the announcement, “All passengers boarding flight ___ for Dubai, your flight has been delayed”. Damn. Double Damn. This didn’t seem like a very good start.

I kept wandering around. My mom chose to remain seated and observe the people around, trying to locate other passengers who might be traveling with us on the package tour. We had been informed by our travel agent that there were 4 other passengers from Chennai and that we might be able to identify them by the bags they carried: The complimentary hand baggage provided by the tour operators. Of the four, one was a mother-daughter duo and the other was a lady and a young man, we were told.

Our flight was to stop over at Dubai and then proceed to Milan. I did notice a short lady with frizzy hair and a harried expression who had the aforementioned bag, but she was heading for Kenya. Not Milan.

After a LOT of time later, we found that our flight was only delayed by half hour. I felt waves of relief wash over me. I’d been seriously worried since we had a connecting flight from Dubai to Milan to board and if our first flight were to be too delayed, we might end up missing the connecting flight and that would throw our plans out of gear.

Once we boarded the flight, I used the warm wet towel that the air hostess handed us and tried to wipe the fatigue off my face. I dozed fitfully. Once we landed in Dubai, we literally ran through the airport so as not to miss our connecting flight. Luckily, for us, we didn’t.

A 6.5-hour flight later, we landed in Milan. While I had found the Dubai airport sterile, cold, and almost clinical, the airport at Milano seemed warm and welcoming. After all the formalities were over, we made our way to Exit 7. A board saying “Uscita” marked the exit. My mom and I struggled with all our baggage and stood at the exit.

I was just about to call up the tour manager and give him a piece of my mind when a genial man with a big smile on his face approached us. Seeing that he was Indian, I jumped to the wrong conclusion that he was our tour manager. It turned out to be a co-passenger on our trip. He had been waiting at Milan for the past 4 hours. Alarmed that the rest of the trip was going to continue in the same vein with delays and halts everywhere, I shared my apprehension with the aforesaid genial man, Ganesh.

It turned out that the driver of our tour bus was present at the airport and was blissfully seated inside the bus, happily unaware of all the stressed-out passengers searching for the bus. And since he couldn’t speak a word of English, communication was a moot point.

We called up the tour manager and found out the exact number of passengers who had to board the bus and consequently the number of people we had to wait for. After what seemed like an eternity, the rest of the passengers made their way to the bus and we started off.

However, our streak of bad luck was determined to follow us for a bit longer. The bus broke down not once but twice until we changed buses and reached our hotel in Venice sometime at nightfall. We found that the tour manager had left our dinner in our rooms and gone to sleep! This irked one of our co-passengers Padu, who woke up the manager and blasted him. My mom and I were too tired to take part in this heated exchange and we went to our room only to collapse on the bed. I woke up around 3 am and puked, too.

We awoke early the next day, showered, had breakfast and headed out to St. Marks’s square in Venice. With the tall church with intricate church art in front of a large square courtyard, St. Marks’s square is so magical that you can spend hours doing nothing but observe its beauty. We did precisely that, but for about 45 minutes. St. Marks’s square is also famous for its pigeons that live there. I watched a little girl with blond curls chase after the pigeons and felt deeply relaxed.

We had the option of going for a gondola ride, but we chose to sit and take in the beauty of the square. This square has been featured in Hindi movies such as ‘The Great Gambler’ when Zeenat Aman and Amitabh Bachchan take a ride in the gondola; ‘Bachna Ae Haseeno’ during the ‘Khuda Jaane’ song where Deepika Padukone and Ranbir Kapoor wander in and out of the square; English movies such as ‘Just Married’ when Brittany Murphy and Ashton Kutcher visit Italy during their honeymoon, and in ‘The Tourist’ starring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp. ‘The Tourist’ is one movie that captures the beauty of Venice almost in its entirety.

Some of the other passengers went on the gondola ride. Mr. Z, our tour manager then took us to the glass factory where we saw how the craftsmen deftly fashioned beautiful glass figurines from molten glass. They made it look so easy! We then headed to the liner that would take us on a cruise on the Adriatic Sea. This was almost a life-altering experience, coz I’d never felt that good to be out on the sea as I did then. We saw the Bridge of Sighs. The collective sighs of prisoners taken to their execution is said to have been heard as they walked over this bridge, hence the name. One of the tourists who had come with us got separated from the group in the tour during the gondola ride. He found his way back and Mr. Z in his usual nonchalant way waited for him for about 30 minutes and then left without him. LOL.

Mr. Z told us a few facts about the places that we saw and after lunch, we headed for Florence.

An Artist’s Dream - Florence

Florence is one of the most artistically alive places in Europe. Every street corner has a caricaturist, guitar player or some other artiste exhibiting his or her talent. We went to another square in Florence and spent some time admiring the statues and soaking up the culture. We also walked by the Arno river and watched the sunset. We were taken to the famous ‘sunset point’ from where we could observe the whole city at dusk. This more than made up for our rather unsteady start the previous day and Mr. Z was clearly making a huge effort to ensure that our holiday was back on track and we had no complaints whatsoever.

The next leg of our trip included Rome, Pisa, and Vatican City over two days. The Trevi fountain in Rome, which has been featured in movies like ‘Three Coins in a Fountain’ was our first stop. Our guide told us what we already knew – that if we dropped a coin into the Trevi fountain, we would come back to Italy –or at least that’s how the story goes. He also said if we dropped two coins, we would find a good spouse. I had a sneaking suspicion he was just kidding, but a lot of people got more generous with their purse strings when they heard that!

We then went to the Colosseum, which stirred up scenes from the Gladiator and other films that have portrayed its bloody and violent history. My mom, in particular, was simply fascinated by the Colosseum.

The next day, we went to Pisa. It was a cool, rainy morning and umbrellas were being sold for five euros everywhere. We saw the famous leaning tower, which is one of the wonders of the world. We posed for pictures and some tourists were taking the customary picture where they pretended to push the leaning tower with a finger.

When we went to the Vatican city that afternoon, we were entering the smallest independent state in the world both by area and population. We saw from afar the place where the Pope lives. The art housed in the Vatican literally took our breath away! Just my luck that my camera didn’t work very well in the rather dark rooms, and I missed out on a lot of beautiful pictures. My co-passengers were very sweet and shared the pictures taken on their fancy cameras with me :)

This brought us to the end of our tour of Italy and although we visited a lot of scenic places in Europe, Italy will always remain my favorite.

Scintillating Switzerland

I held on to this thought until my next favorite destination arrived – Switzerland. If ever there’s a scenic place on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this. The lakes are so stunningly beautiful. Each sight is so picturesque, it is like a postcard, a painting, fit to be framed and hung on the wall to be gazed at, at leisure.

We visited Mount Titlis from our hotel in Engelberg. The approach to the hotel was carved out of a mountain and we walked in through the tunneled insides. We dined on chocolates, which were cheaper than water! We drank water from the taps in our hotel since it was advisable. It got dark by 6 pm in Switzerland. Everything also shut by 6 pm and the place went dead, so we walked around discovering that there was no life here after dark. We sat outside a big, pretty fountain in the hotel premises and posed for pictures.

We took the ropeway to Mt. Titlis the next day seeing several high snow-capped peaks on the way. 
We also went to Luzern and Zurich by coach where we did some shopping. The stone lion at Luzern was impressive and we got to pass by UBS or the Swiss bank where I’d spent a short stint of 8 months working in Hyderabad. I wore my UBS blazer in Switzerland just for kicks☺

Gorgeous Germany

We then went on our coach to the Black Forest, Germany, which had a cover of coniferous trees. We stopped at a delicatessen where I chatted with a German girl, who was stunned that Indians were coming all the way to see Heidelberg and other places in Germany. She was a candlestick maker. We had the best original black forest pastry there, which was totally different from the sham versions we get in India. There was a house in the shape of a cuckoo clock from where we bought one as a souvenir. They were showing demos of how to use cuckoo clocks and how they were made. We bought an original hand-wound cuckoo clock, not the battery-operated one.

We then went to Cologne Cathedral in Cologne, from where we bought a bottle of Eau de cologne as a souvenir. Cruising down the Rhine river was a magical experience as we found out when we saw the castles, trees, and embankments on either side of the river. Mom almost expected Hansel and Gretel to come peeping out of one of the houses and leave a trail of breadcrumbs. It was totally like stepping into a fairytale.

Beautiful Brussels

Our next stop was Brussels where we saw the Mannekin Pis. We were also taken to the shop where Tintin comics were made legendary. We indulged in Belgian waffles and chocolates that melted in our mouths, even beating Swiss chocolates. There was a golden statue that we had to touch for good luck. We went to Mini-Europe, where mini-models of all the famous buildings of each country in Europe were featured, for example, the Eiffel Tower of Paris, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, The Big Ben and so on.

Pleasant Paris

The romantic city of Paris beckoned to us next, although our tour manager, Z unromantically warned us against pickpockets while in the vicinity of the Eiffel Tower. There were beautiful cafes everywhere with exotic names like Poirot and Shakespeare. The streets of Paris however, were jampacked and the cars were bumper to bumper affording a view of a straight line of lights from where we sat up in the coach. At night, we saw a cabaret, which was very elegant and tasteful. Ani, of course, was comparing it to the Thai cabarets she had seen and was pooh-poohing it saying this one had no skin show whatsoever. I thought it was rather elegant since I wasn’t there to see t –s and a--. Looks like some of them were!

The next day we went to the Louvre and saw the Mona Lisa. We went up to the second level of the Eiffel tower and saw the view. It afforded us a glance of the manicured lawns and gardens and fountains in front of the tower.

Lovely London

We next made our way to London through the Chunnel or Channel Tunnel. The entire bus went into the train, which went through the Chunnel underneath the sea from France to London. In London, the group wanted to have a beer, so we stopped at a pub. We saw the Big Ben, Thames River, the London Bridge and the Tower Bridge, the London Eye. We went to Madame Tussaud’s and posed with the wax figurines. We saw the change of the guards at the Buckingham Palace. We took the tube to Baker Street and a ride on a double-decker bus, just for the experience. On the whole, it was a blast. We shopped for a couple of hours then stopped for lunch at Pizza Hut.

During the entire trip, Mr. Z had often remarked that this group had displayed an enormous sense of camaraderie and goodwill. He kept saying we were good sports. A, the girl who had come with her aged mom was lively and flirtatious and would start a game of antakshari every now and then. The others would follow suit. It was hard not to get caught up in the bonding. Mr. Z. was good fun, too. There were families with little kids, elders, a dying man who had come on this trip as a sort of dying wish- a whole motley crew of travelers.

Now that it was time to leave for India, I felt tears welling up in my eyes. I didn’t want to come back. It had been such a magical whirlwind tour and I couldn’t believe it had to end so soon. So with a heavy heart, we made our way to the airport and back home.

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