Sunday, June 28, 2009

Naughty birdie...

On our way back from the Greenwich museum, we came across this road sign which has to be best one I've ever come across!



Saturday, June 13, 2009

Home-made prophesy turns real...

This post needs a bit of a prologue... I had started writing (the previous post) about the unforeseen events that we invariably encounter during our travel so much so that we might nearly foretell what could go wrong with our Greece trip. I never got to completing it before Greece happened, so I had to do it retrospectively. Given what we went through in Greece, it's most uncanny but I've realised that oracles are best left with the ancient Greek...

Just a couple of hours before take-off from Athens, we discovered that the seemingly event-free trip had just turned much more eventful than what I had probably begun to imagine in that dreadful post. What ensued was a stomach-churning realisation that we have lost our identities - not a mere mid-life crisis, but much more serious - given to us by our passports. The ordeal started there and lasted nearly 4 more days spent mostly in a smoky internet cafe and various embassies.

Looking back it seems stupid that we would carry our passports in a backpack that must have looked like kid's play to the experienced. So, we clearly invited trouble and trouble sure came in many forms: a quintessential Indian bureaucrat, the consular officer at the embassy, who probably gets a high every time someone is at his door with a forlorn face hoping for some help and compassion; the UK embassy that I've heard doesn't mete out much help even to its own citizens, much less to us immigrants (or "aliens" as Americans like to use); that gaping bureaucratic hole between UK home office and the embassy in Athens and so on... Bless those immigration officers who were willing to plug that hole and let us in with a new passport and copy of our stolen visa.

So, note for self: no more home-made prophesy; leave it to the experts...