Life Story

Post Number 53 : Around Europe in 100 Days – Nous Voyageons aux Hollande

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

A travelogue capturing the experiences of Amsterdam – delays, canals, Red Light district, and fries.

DAY 1

Having explored Brussels and Bruges, we set out early for Netherlands. It was to be a 3-hour journey so we were confident of making it there by noon and were already planning what all we could cover within the day. But if there’s anything we learnt in these 100 days, it’s that plans go down the drain quicker than gelato down our throats. Due to some construction work, all trains to Netherlands were delayed indefinitely. We sat on the station for close to 90 mins as train after train got delayed and/or cancelled. Finally, frustrated, we jumped on a random train to Antwerp just to go somewhere.

Antwerp

The Antwerp Station is an Architectural Beauty

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Post Number 50 : Around Europe in 100 Days – Nous Voyageons en Belgique

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

A travelogue capturing the experience of Belgium – Brussels, Bruges, Beer, and Fries

Still buzzing from the trip to Paris, we rested for a solid 12 hours and decided to leave for Belgium. We had a week off and there was no chance we were going to spend it in Lille. Deepesh had officially joined us and the six of us booked the Airbnb in a rush and boarded the train to Brussels. The bogey we sat in had an overexcited annoying group of men drunk on beer who spent their time (loudly) shouting at each other until they got off and decided to pee on the train tracks in a queue. So much for Swachh Belgium Abhiyaan. I was weaning off my ‘Look! European grasslands!’ phase but I still see pictures of landscapes in my Camera-Roll so we’ll treat that as Work-In-Progress. Read More

Post Number 49: Around Europe in 100 Days – Nous Voyageons à Paris

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

A travelogue on exploring Paris – tourist spots, commotion, eccentric crowds, and Seine

Still reeling from the adventure of the first day, we took things slowly in the subsequent days. We attended the orientation program of our exchange university, realized there were too many Indians there, got ourselves French SIM cards, explored Lille, realized McDonald’s served beer and that avocado sandwiches were atrocious, visited an art museum that was so painfully dull that we resorted to making memes, went to the local casino, and settled on Maggi as our staple dinner. Over the weekend, Sumit’s friends were going to be in Paris so we decided to join them. Read More

Post Number 48 : Around Europe in 100 Days – L’arrivée en France

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

A travelogue exploring the journey to Europe, full of misadventures and bad luck.

Once upon a time (in 2019), when Corona was but a beer and the word pandemic made one harken back to the days of the Bubonic Plague, I was fortunate to get a chance to travel through Europe in the name of ‘Student Exchange’- the global tourism scheme sustaining many a hostels, dingy pubs, (misguided) 2004 movie enthusiasts, and petty thieves relying on the naivete of unsuspecting kids travelling through post-colonial colonial countries.

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Post Number 12 : The Price of Immortality

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

In 1954, Jonas Salk developed a vaccine to treat the ever increasing menace of Poliomyelitis. In 1955 the first human cells were successfully cloned. Within years, the discovery of the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) was linked to the occurrence of cervical cancer in women. On surface, these remarkable medical accomplishments seem totally unrelated. But as you may have guessed, there is indeed a correlation between them, and it is one that rarely gets the credit it deserves. All these accomplishments were a consequence of medical testing done on the tumour cells of an African American woman, Henrietta Lacks, whose cells were the first ‘immortal’ line of cells.

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