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Magic Escape

 We had a funny experience at the office of tourism in Romans-sur-Isere. Having wandered there to see a fountain someone had pinned to the location on Google, we walked around the village trying in vain to find the said fountain. So we walk into the office of tourism and ask the nice lady there where we might see it. She breaks into a big smile (clearly we were not the first people drawn by the fountain) and says "Try in Roma". The village ended up being a great place to stop by anyway with a lot of local detail to take it - large shoe sculptures scattered all over town, one of a woman showing her backside in the middle of a park, a bustling bazaar and the best éclair of the trip made with a strawberry and pistachio filling. Romans is the one of those perfect escapes that dot the countryside. You can dive into it like Alice in Wonderland - immerse in the magic, leave the real world behind for a bit. You come out and are back on the highway passing by mundane things like gas stations and grocery stores.

 When I think to every unfamiliar place I have ever been, there was a bit of Romans there - in a unique and peculiar way that made sense for that place. As I write this, a trip to Haridwar in my high school years comes to mind - a place features so much in mythology and folklore that you imagine you already know the place. Yet when I arrived there, everything was imbued with a sense of magic. The thali meal we ate at a popular Bengali run establishment was unlike anything I knew to expect there. The market place was full of interesting wares not less charming than what I saw at Romans so many years later. A few days later, we boarded the train to return home - the magic of Haridwar left far behind but some remnants of the impressions collected during that short visit still live on. I will remember "Try in Roma" for a long time.

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