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Showing posts from May, 2012

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Seville

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SEVILLE Sevilla After living up to some wonderful moments at Granada, the birthplace of the renowned Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, we decided to further our coadventure through the heartland of the southern Iberian Peninsula, composed of lowlands, mountains and valleys. You’ve got it right. To arrive at Seville, we traversed the fascinating Spanish heartland. The landscape presented some vistas composed of rustic plains, lowlands, winding roads through the Sierra and then vast stretches of olive orchards. About 200 years back, a couple of decades after Napoleon’s army plundered and destroyed parts of Alhambra, an American diplomat and writer, Washington Irving and his Russian counterpart traversed the path from Seville to Granada. It was highly adventurous then, because of the fact that the transport system at that time was horse-drawn carriages and muleteers. It was such that they could ‘wander among the romantic mountains of Andalusia’ (Tales of Alhamb...

ALONG THE RIVER VLTAVA

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ALONG THE VLTAVA RIVER – A Photo Essay on journey to Praha   The Berlin Central train station or Berlin Hauptbahnhof. It looks more like an international airport than a railway terminus. There are several tiers of platforms both above and below the main concourse, everything is shiny and spotlessly clean, large shafts send in streams of sunlight, and there’s the smell of coffee in the air. From here, the express train to Prague. The coupes are cozy and comfortable, and we had only one co-passenger—an immaculately dressed elderly person who seemed to have emerged out of the sketches found in nineteenth-century novels like Charles Dickens’s ‘The Pickwick Papers’. He sat quietly like a statue throughout the journey (perhaps because he did not speak English, and we did not speak German) and got off at Dresden, a picturesque border town in Germany famous for farmers’ carnivals, like the melas at Pushkar in Rajasthan and Santiniketan in West Bengal. After Dresden, the journey t...