Two continents, seven cities, six flights, four trains and two buses. Oh, and a ferry. Not to mention miles on cars and on foot. A vacation is commonly meant to rest body and mind, but ours rested the mind while quite taxing our bodies. A whole month seems just a blur now - flashes of conversations, visuals burned into the memory, aches and pains in muscles that you still can feel if you try.

That Bangalore has changed in three years is a given. Whether it has changed in a way I approve of, I don't yet know. I grew up in a sleepy town, but longed for first-world style glitz, glamour and wealth. Now that it has the glitz, glamour and wealth (without the infrastructure), I'm not sure I like it. People have changed - with success comes confidence, and then goes humility... Notwithstanding, the weather is still the best thing about Bangalore - a fact made painfully obvious on mini-trips to Madras, Bombay and Tirupati, where we probably lost about 30% of bodily fluid in 4 days. I loved Bombay - if only we could take Bangalore's weather and drop it on Bombay...

UK, we thoroughly enjoyed - though D said that London was like any other European city, I thought it did have a certain quirkiness mixed with gravitas that was very likeable. Traces of the lost glory of the British Empire were much in evidence - very interesting to an Indian. Oxford seemed straight out of Harry Potter, not to mention saale-saab, who's suddenly started to look a bit like HP as well. And it's ooold... it came as a bit of a shock to me to realize that the building I was standing in was being built when Genghiz Khan was around. And Windsor Castle is a stately pile to be sure, containing loot from all over the world. Seeing Tipu Sultan's sword and coat-of-arms twanged some long-lost nationalistic nerve somewhere...
The Thames seemed to be everywhere we went, i.e., we went only to places where the Thames is. It was full of swans and tried to use an alias in Oxford (the "Isis"), which we saw through in no time...