Europe is a place of amazing contrasts. While it’s history and Natural beauty is open to all and amazingly maintained—there are few persons on the road or countryside to get acquainted with or know as their lives are kept behind closed doors. In India everything is open!!! Even through a coach ride you can see almost everything you need to know about the Indian way of life!!!!! The pavements in Europe are deserted,roads are filled with cars and huge fields are devoid of workers. Only rarely will you see people except in a few places—like the roadside pavement eateries which are scattered round the cities like the wild dandelions and the bluebells adorning the country highway sides……
The Natural beauty is phenomenal. Rolling countryside's of France with scattered farm houses and villages, or the stupendous mountainsides and greenery of Switzerland where lakes and waterfalls appear casually like the roadside billboards or direction signage. Italy is flat and busy with heavy industrialization and some very ordinary Graffiti Art smearing inviting walls, whereas Austria is more natural than Switzerland with very warm people and unspoiled mountain sides and buildings making it more like a place to come back often and stay rather than a place to tour. The German Black Forest is dark, mysterious and incredibly beautiful whereas Belgium (mainly Brussels) is quaint and antique with shops selling embroidered works and different styles of chocolate on both sides of cobbled narrow roads. All of these villages have their churches as their highest structures and clock towers which have been in existence for centuries ringing in the hours and witnessing events which are only found in the history books. Amsterdam remains sleepy and under populated with spontaneity appearing only on the weekends in the local square and multicuisine restaurants and dance bars. We felt the burning sun in Italy, lattice moments of clarity and sights obscured partially by clouds and raindrops in Austria, blistering North Sea cold winds in the Netherlands and the free flowing snowflakes which rendered the green fields and dark rocks into white unending bedspreads in Mt.Jungfrau Bach in Switzerland.
The buildings are magnificently maintained as if they had been freshly painted yesterday though with steep admission charges and expensive eateries and memorabilia stores. History and events flash in front like the moving vibrant images through the plate glasses of the tourist buses. If Napoleon is buried in the Les Invalides then Pope John Paul the 6th is embalmed as St.Jerome in the Vatican. If Anne Frank hid in the lonely attics of an obscure Amsterdam Road, then Joan of Arc rode through the verdant fields of New Orleans.
There are many rivers—the Seine, The Rhine, the Tiber, the Amster, the Deka, the Engelberg,the Arno and many others and we saw three of the seven Wonders—Eiffel, Colloseum and Leaning Tower of Pisa.
But the cream of them all were the Art Museums. Obviously the Louvre where the best of creation by human beings are crammed in gallery after gallery—or the outstanding Rijkmuseum and Vincent van Gogh Museum where painters like Rembrandt, Renoir, Pissaro, Vermeer, Monet, Manet, Cezanne, Toulose-Lautrec. Gaugain, Lister, and obviously Vincent Van Gogh share the walls like glittering crystals as in the Swarovski Museum in Wattens in Austria.
Our country is of course blessed with all this dating probably centuries earlier and is a place which has no equals in our heart.
But Europe is a place of pilgrimage where one MUST go in a lifetime and where one can selectively return. If you have not seen Europe ,you have missed humanity at it’s best, history at it’s most resplendent and Natural Beauty at it’s best preserved state.
