Since I seem to have been bitten by the travel bug, it's cruel of fate to have brought me to California, which seems far away from everywhere and everyone! I'll probably never get around to organizing all those pictures and telling all those stories I'm always promising everyone; they're better in person anyway. In the meantime, here's a skeletal travelogue-in-waiting that I intend to expand at my "leisure"...
...when my delinquency began. My exploits during this period are described (very) briefly here.
Travels within England were embarrassingly few. London doesn't count; short hillwalking excursions to Snowdonia and the Lake District; brief standard forays to Bath and Stratford; edge of Birmingham en route to Cadbury World. My college roommate Lauri Lizotte's quest for her (maternal) ancestral home took us by bus-tube-train-tram-train-bus-bus from Cambridge through London, Manchester and Rochdale to Bacup, a little town in the middle of nowhere, where we finally found some evidence of past Hartleys, along with a surprising number of combination Chinese takeaway/fish 'n' chip shops.
Cambridge's generous
inter-session recesses provided ample opportunity for off-season
explorations of the Old World. A winter 1994 jaunt around Europe
took me to Budapest (to visit my high school buddy Eric), then to
Barcelona and along the south coast of France and up to Paris, all with my
Cambridge housemate (and Harvard classmate, though I didn't know him there
-- very small world) Kashif and sometimes with assorted other ex-pats
(including Pat!).
Ah, antiquity: I took my first (foreshadowing!) trip to
Egypt with my Egyptian classmate Gamila during the post-Lent
break (pyramids! mosques! juice stands!). In December 1995 Lesley and
I made a spur-of-the-moment escape from the monotonous Cambridge grey
to Greece. The kinder Hellenic clime obviously suited us well;
in only a week we managed to invent the Nancy-Lesley religion (many
important tenets), set certain records Of Which We Shall Not Speak (we
were truly innocent victims of the entire Zorba affair), and reimagine
Paul and Ambika's "real
couple,
fake temple" engagement pictures, after some inspired frolicking
based on our favorite cheesy karaoke videos.
Too much to say here; delinquency prevails! So far I have only the briefest of glimpses, some general China travel pictures, and miscellany for the culturally inclined. 