Was today typical..no never. There is a lot happens everyday. Trying to box the experience into similar experiences makes a day typical.
Today marks a different day altogether. Back from vacation, Back to London, energised and catching up on the old work.
With kids and family in London, time to start to explore the city with them. Also restarting my blogging
Gathering some stats from my bard guru
Human’s Average sleeping hours per day is 7 hours and spends 13 years of sleeping in total.
Most wake up at 7 AM and go to sleep at 11 PM
Average person spends 10 mins for breakfast, 15 mins for exercise, 1 hr on phone, 2 hours on social media , 4 hrs watching TV
Some unique facts
Average person blinks more than 10k times per day
Generates 1.5 litres of Saliva everyday
Heart beats 100k times per day
Brains produce 70 k thoughts per day , that is 48 thoughts every minute when not sleeping and more than over one thought every second.. he/she/it needs a lot of meditation
Disclosure : Some of this do not apply to me, hence I am extraordinary person ane not an average person.
Does it sound greek and latin to you? Actually it should sound welsh and welsh only to you. Yes the above are some words from the Welsh language, which I noticed during our travel.
I was trying to read or pronounce it and gave it up later. I observed that lot of Welsh words were without or less vowels. It was an interesting exercise , a great stress buster and time killer to try to pronounce those words during my stay at Wales. A few samples for you to try!!!
We were staying in an Airbnb. The Airbnb was cozy with an underground living room and 3 bathing rooms. The ground floor had a bed room. A gaming room with a fuss ball and a snooker table. First floor and 2nd floor had 2 rooms each with some single and double beds. I Stortford Manoj was my roomie. Travel from the underground to 2nd floor itself was itself a great trek for me,
I, Madurai Manoj (another Manoj in our team) and Arun were teaming up frequently to play the game. Senthil, Rajesh and few others would join us as well. There was a Pac-man console game and fuss ball stand which attracted Sathish a lot.
It was dinner time. Few from our group volunteered to buy dinner, few ventured to buy fruits, breads and eggs for the breakfast next day . The crew bought a nice fish , Rajesh painstakingly fried the fish and served everyone during dinner time. All sat together, started out dinner with some interesting chit chats about the walking experience. Post dinner, the group dispersed to listen to music, to play cards and to sleep. At midnight, there were thunderous snores from every room in the building.
Next Day
The next day was a trip to Pen y Fan .
Planning was so great and I didn’t bother to know where I was staying. While I was talking to my wife in the morning, she asked me for the place I was staying . I was clueless for a moment. Trying to remember the signboards, it was a bunch of consonants and nothing strikes. While she was waiting, I swiftly opened Gokul maps, sorry Google maps to figure out where I am . Gokul Maps was the saviour which revealed that I was staying at “Pontypridd“. Gokul maps aka Google Maps was a new terminology that I learnt from friends here. Doesn’t it sound good?, Gokul mapsssss 🙂
While typing Pontypridd, I always typed Ponty as Pondy, and replaced the ‘d’ with a ‘t’. Looks like a bit of a muscle memory in action towards “Pondycherry”, a neighbouring state of Tamilnadu, a french colony, known for its beaches, Auroville , french architecture, etc..
“Wales” also reminded me about a couple of my friends with a short or nick named “Vels” 🙂 :-). Lots of interesting connections at this trip. The trip also ended up meeting one of my ex-colleague and friend “Hari” and his family at Cardiff after almost 20 years.
We started our day leisurely. I finished my breakfast with eggs and fruits. Few hours later, the team went to a nearby restaurant for a proper English breakfast. I had a 2nd breakfast as well which tasted very good.
Post breakfast, we started to Pen y Fan. It was just a half an hour drive to reach the base around noon. it was quite sunny and there were hiking the peak.
There were 2 pathways, one started near a place named “Pont ar Daf” and other, a bit steeper one, next to a place called “Storey Arms”. Many ascended on the easy side and finished on the not so easy one. We did the other way, started from Storey Arms and finished at Pont ar Daf.
Vijay Amirtraj, our proud photographer initiated the trek with a starting pic. As we hiked, slowly the group start to disintegrate and started to hike in batches at their comfortable speed. The first hour was sunny, not so steep and as we climbed it was getting colder and colder and was also steeper. Rajesh gave me company throughout the hike. The places were quite scenic and we took a lot of pictures as we hiked.
The pics here do not seem to do justice to what we saw. It looked too good to describe. At places, it was very steep on the sides, and we ascended on the side with a lot of other people hiking the trail.
The photo below which shows 2 peaks, first one is the Corn Du and 2nd one is the Pen y Fan. There was a milestone at Pen y Fan, which obviously stated Pen y Fan and many who climbed, took a pic at the stone. It was quite chill,windy, fingers froze and couldn’t start for more than 10 minute at the peak. As we descended, we were thinking about Satish’s expression the previous day and was guessing his thought process on this hike. While we kept guessing, everyone completed the hike and were back to Pont ar Daf for some final photographs.
All boarded their respective cars and was back to our Airbnb accommodation in a matter of 30-45 minutes. We ordered our dinner as like yesterday , had a group chat till late night along with the dinner and went back to our beds.
The final day
Almost everyone finished their breakfast, packed their bags and was ready to vacate the accommodation. Checking out from the accommodation., the final day plan was to visit Barry Island and head back to Cambridge. One of my friend is at Cardiff and I planned to meet him while the rest of the folks enjoyed at beach. He drove all the way from his home to Barry Island to pick me up. We went to his home. I met his family and had a wonderful South Indian lunch I have been longing for. It was all burger, pizza, subs for the past 2 days. The lunch was a nice Drumstick Sambar, Rasam, Cabbage Poriyal, Pappads, Curd, & Mor Milagai. While having our lunch, we reminisced about the office life, the restaurants that we visited, cinemas, etc. As a cherry on the cake, I was offered a herbal tea, called the roobois tea. Bidding good bye to their family, Hari offered me to drop me at Barry Island. It started to rain and turned into a sleet as we started.
My car mates waited for my return and we started our journey back to Cambridge. With a few pits stops for breaks and dinner, we reached Senthil’s home close to midnight and thus the trip ended well with a lot new friends and wonderful memories.
Mukund & Mukund Only 