Windsor Castle!!

So the English summer had just begun and the air was still cold for us. We planned our first weekend outing to the Royal Weekend Home - The Windsor Castle. Its about half an hour of train journey from Reading, via Slough. It was our first British Train experience and also my first international train experience. The diesel trains reminded me of the long distance trains here in India, though these were much shorter. They have two classes, the first and standard, but you can hardly tell the difference, except more spacious seats. We changed the train at Slough and boarded a 3 coach train to Windsor.

The castle is a 5 min. walk from the train station. The day was bright and sunny. As we approached the castle, we could hear a band play inside, which we figured out later was the famous "Change of Guards" ceremony going on. We had missed it. After taking the tickets, and the audio tour handset, we started off. The first view of the castle is very overwhelming. A big green lawn welcomes you and the castle is situated at the backdrop. As we approached the outer walls, we could see small slits in the walls, which were provided to put the gun barrels out for firing at the enemy.

Inside the wall are 3 main structures, the castle and state apartments, the chapel and staff apartments. The chapel is St. George's Chapel, a huge and ancient structure built by King Edward IV. The architecture of the chapel is beautiful. Read all about the chapel here. The ceiling of the chapel is marked with plaques of various royal army guards. The altar is magnificent and hosts the plaques of all the knights till date. It feels very nice and quiet while sitting here.

After the chapel, we headed for the round tower and the state apartments. It had a long queue for entry, so we decided to have our lunch and then stand in the queue. While in the Q, we got our first sight of the bobbies and their marching, which I must say is very admirable. The first room inside is a museum of various paintings owned by the royal family and prepared by world famous artists, including Da Vinci. It was a very exciting feeling to see a painting done by such a master with my own eyes. Then we entered the doll house, which was gifted to Queen Mary. It is a small scale model of the castle's state apartments and is very cute.

The last were the State apartments which were huge rooms used by the royal family for various purposes, like dining, meeting guests, bedrooms, baths and so on. All the rooms have lots of paintings and rich upholstery.

With that, we had come to the end of our tour and were very pleased to see a nice castle as our first attraction. We bought a shot glass in one of the stores, where M picked up 2 postcards, thinking they were free to take and left for Reading.