23 Jul 1997 Left around 8:30am this morning on a train from Rome to Naples, a journey of ~2.5 hours. The route passed through scraggly mountains and little stations. The stations here are very low – about a foot high – making use of all the steps on the train doors. Somewhat like village stations…
22 Jul 1997 Rome, day 2: Vatican was first on my list. The queue was luckily on the shaded side of the city walls, and moved fast. I was in by 9:30 am. I hired an audio guide – a real smart move, as I discovered later. Without it the tour would not have been…
20th July 1997 The train got into Rome at 21:05. Setting about finding the YH, I felt something I hadn’t felt in Venice: safe. No tension about the dark. The metro and buses were bustling at that hour and people were friendly, going out of their way to point me to my stop. The YH…
Train from Venice to Rome 15:20 – 21:05, 20th Jul 1997On the train south: after Bologna the countryside was uncannily like Maharashtra – green and hilly, the farms and houses more like India than England. Sunflower fields. The whole train journey was about 5.5 hrs, and I didn’t once fall asleep, alternately writing this letter…
Milan en route Venice 20 Jul 1997 Need to change trains at Milan: I killed some hours walking to the YH, but found it had shut for the morning. I did not yet have a reservation for staying the last night on the return trip, but I thought I’d figure something out later – this…
Foreword 02 Apr 2026 These are from 31 pages of handwritten notes from July 1997, written across the trip itself – in hostel common rooms, on trains, on a station floor at 2am. I was 25, living in Reading UK, working for ICL on a project called OpenPAS. I’ve always loved train journeys since I…
Eiffel Tower 1 Jan 1996 New Year’s Day. Our last day in Paris. We set off after 12 noon, Amar, BG and Venky to the police station and the Indian Embassy for FIR and duplicate passport, J, V, and me towards Musée de Orsay. The museum is closed on Mondays, so we walked along the…
These are from six pages of typed notes from Jan 1996, written about my first trip to Paris with a bunch of colleagues who were my social circle. We were all living and working in Reading, UK, for ICL (the parent company of ICIM, Pune India). Many of us were on a software project called…
Versailles, Notre Dame, Seine, Blanche 31 Dec 1995 Versailles Palace On 31st morning we went to the palace at Versailles, which is about 30 kms from Paris, but well connected by trains. (I can’t imagine what we’d have done if the public transport were on strike!) Versailles was glamorous and yes, beautiful. The township around…
Arrival 29 Dec 1995 Six of us – Jayesh, Vipul, Amar, BG, Venky, and me – all working in the UK through ICIM, decided to go to Paris for the new year weekend. We almost didn’t go, thanks to a public transport strike in France. Then the strike ended and the holidays were still there…
