A day at the Covent Garden Market, London, March 2008 March 2008 was arguably the worst month of my life. But, it had started out with the promise of being probably the best!! I was travelling with a couple of of my colleagues to London for a month. We had been to the UK a couple of times before and knew our way around, so there was none of the settling down period. We had 4 weekends to roam around (with one of them being a 4 day weekend). to top it all, since our visit coincided with the London office's yearly offsite we were also booked in, for an all expenses paid weekend in Paris on the last weekend of March. for the other weekends we had planned one in Amsterdam and the long one in Spain, a driving holiday from Barcelona to Alicante!!! so you could imagine why I actually looked forward even to the painful 8 hour flight to Heathrow.
Some say, if something could go wrong, it would, at the most inopportune time, and in the worst possible manner. Unfortunately this was to be the month I found out that they were, well, absolutely correct. In the first weekend itself I left my backpack while getting off a train. I am very careless by nature, which is the reason that I carry with me, a backpack all the time even if the only thing it contains is a pen. I could lose a pen but surely not my beloved backpack. But lose it I did. only this time it was not only a pen that was in it, I lost underpants, tooth brush, deos, clothes, keys, 5 sets of contact lens, a tripod, an expensive underwater camera housing that i had recently purchased, a large amount of money and my PASSPORT!!!
I was devastated. what a catastrophic loss. what a monumental moron i was. all my plans lay in ruins. all my efforts to find my backpack, all the lost baggage reporting, all assurances that I would surely find my backpack, all in vain. I was only left with a massive credit card bill owing to those non refundable "budget" Easyjet flight tickets to mainland Europe. To add to my miseries was the lethargic, inefficient and chaotic Indian Embassy. while I stood in a mile long queues at 6 in the morning, getting soaked in ice cold drizzle, hoping to make it to the counter before they run out of tokens, my mates were frolicking in the Red Light Discrict of Amsterdam (the real DAM).
I did finally manage to get the dulicate Passport in the last week of March. That weekend when my mates were in Paris I had an entire weekend to myself, all alone. And not surprisingly, it rained the entire Saturday. Just as I was about to turn into an atheist, the Gods finally smiled on me and presented me with a brilliant sunny Sunday. But after the battering I got all the month all I wanted to do was to go home. I was actually not sure what I wanted to do that day. I had seen all the standard touristy placed in London on previous visits and was in no mood to revisit them. One thing that I had not seen yet, however, was the weekend markets around London. The closest one was the Covent Market. As i started my day, i wondered, how good could it be?
The following pictures illustrate my day at the Covent Garden Market.. |