PERSONAL STORIES Arundati
Dandpani tells International Grad Mag about her first impressions on arriving in Scotland to study
This September I arrived in the UK from New Delhi by the plush Jet Airways 8 hour flight. Landing at Heathrow airport as an excited postgraduate, the feeling was better than what I had even felt before college. I felt young with worldly joy, yet old with self-wisdom! It took 45 minutes to undercut even the fast- track immigration queue, after which I got a chest XRAY, testing negative for tuberculosis. Bags together, I hit the road. London and its dense urban woes were not for me. I was thankful I would be living away in the country of Single Malt and Coffee Liquors! Proud as though I held the Saltire jewels, I was ready to scale the year’s odds.
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The drive was long and I passed Wales, Harlech, Tenby and finally the outskirts of Glasgow. The hilly Scottish countryside was a mouthful: lakes, hills, bridges, battlefields, castles, and Bed and
London and its dense urban woes were not for me. I was thankful I would be living away in the country of Single Malt and Coffee Liquors!
breakfasts at every hairpin bend! At Marros I stopped at Stockwell’s B&B, a cozy lodge run by a woman with an apple tree in the porch, a church in the side and a piggery at the back, who offered the best soya sausages and faux ham for vegetarian breakfast. Windy Rains chased down climates, but I was equipped with thermals,
an umbrella and running shoes. This would see me through a lot of the ‘madness’ that BBC kept forecasting.
The day I reached Stirling, the skies were wet and sunny, “the jackal and the fox were getting married” with a merry rainbow in sight. Stirling is a university town, small enough for you to travel without a GPS in. The first few days I bought provisions and adjusted to the 315 square feet of my apartment, en- suite and shared kitchen; an address that what would prove to be a 35 minute walk from the university campus and swimming pool, which I had hoped would become my favorite haunt. Buses also plied every twenty minutes.
I had arrived with bare-minimum baggage—two suitcases and a laptop bag, 2 New Look woolen jackets, and 24 cases of bottled mineral water. I was quite unused to the idea about being able to drink from my shower! Was bottled water a myth put on by huge corporations or was safe drinking
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