Trip to birmingham

On a very early saturday morning, I took the coach from Cardiff to Birmingham. The main purpose of the visit was to visit the Lord Balaji temple there. The trip turned out to be a memorable one for a variety of reasons. Ram, the electrical geek(this chap is doing his phd in electrical engg) came along with me. It is a good two and half hour journey from Cardiff by National Express. Both of us were actually dosing off to sleep as we hadn't slept well the previous night. I actually got a call from Madhavi, my college friend from Sathyabama and it was nice speaking to her as I haven't caught up with her in ages.

We reached Bham around twenty past ten and then immediately boarded a local bus to go to the temple. This bus had other Indians who were also visiting the temple. When we were entering the temple, we were approached by volunteers from the National Blood Service who requested us to donate blood for which we accepted immediately. We told them that we can fix up an appointment after the darshan at the temple. We entered the temple and decided that we would do an archanai for our family. We had a very good darshan and at the end were given our laddus :). Food then followed immediately and man I ate to my heart's content. The menu - Kesari, rice, mullangi sambar, cheppan kazhungu, pickle and paapad. While I was eating my way to glory, one of the guys from somewhere waved at me and his face was very familiar. Then he approached me and immediately popped out a question asking whether I was from DB and I was very happy to have met a DB guy after a long time. His name was Barry(full name is Barani I suppose) and he was from the 1995 batch. In fact during our conversation, it turned out that we had been to the same RSP trip to Calcutta and Darjeeling and at that time I was in my sixth standard and he was in class eight. We then exchanged mobile numbers and then bid goodbye to each other. The next course of action was to donate blood. It was a nice experience to do this sort of a thing but at the end my worry was that they weren't able to extract enough blood within the alloted time. They were only able to fill half the bag and told me that even though it might not be used for a patient, it might come in handy for research purposes. I comforted myself by saying that atleast I had the intention of involving myself with such a cause.

Then after all this, again we caught a bus back into Birmingham city centre. I had earlier given a call to Paul to meet up with him and so we guys met him in the Digbeth coach station. It was really nice of him to take us home and we were just sitting and chatting for some time. Then Paul suggested that we could go to the nearby Star City which is a multiplex and spend our time there. We were just loitering around for a while and then it was time to head back to the coach. Paul dropped us back and then we bid goodbye to him. We reached Cardiff at 9 pm and then I was happilly walking back home with the laddu in my hand. It was truly a memorable trip to be said the least.