I’m on a train from London Euston to Coventry. It’s a one-hour journey. I’m sitting on this train thinking about how quick this journey is compared to what I’ve been accustomed to during my travels in India over the past few months.
Thinking about trains, I remember taking a 12-hour long train from Mumbai’s main station to a commuter town in the middle of Goa. It was a long, grueling first-time ride but the journey was very beautiful. Going from an enormous fast-developing city full of slums to the luscious green jungle. I did wish we went on more train rides like that. What was most enjoyable was the food and drinks coming up and down the train. It didn’t cost much. We got breakfast, lunch and dinner on that one train. Several cups of chai and coffee too, from what I remember. My favourite was when a wala* was calling out “chicken lollipop garam garam” repeatedly. Later in the night after we got to our fancy beach hut, I asked one of the servers there what “garam garam” meant. The translation: hot hot.
This train ride to Coventry isn’t as long as that one train ride I took. The scenery, however, is more or less the same. Green farms, cows, sheep, some horses and the occasional two to five seconds of going through a tunnel. Because England is actually quite a small country, I don’t think you get much of variety of scenery unless you search for it. There is a clear difference between London and all the other major and minor places in England. I’m not so sure if you could say the same about the UK as a whole because it is four countries together as a collective and you could really irk a man from Scotland and a man from Wales if you call them both British. I guess it’s like a few musicians forming a band together out of convenience to be stronger. Maybe that’s a crap example.
*wala is a kind of vendor. Random fact: It’s amongst the 7 most common yet misunderstood words in Hindi.
Nadia Cheung 