Day 2 at Germany

I started my day with a jump start at 6:15 AM without an alarm!

I had set my alarm the previous day in the phone but I’d forgotten that my phone was set to the Indian time. At 3 AM in the morning, I heard a blaring sound in the biting cold and found that it was my sony ericsson waking me up. With great difficulty, I woke up, saw the time, switched off the alarm and dozed off again.

Suddenly, I opened my eyes and then realized that I was in Germany! The time was 6:15 AM, time to wake up.

Went to the bathroom of the PG (One of the best ones I have seen till date, fully dry floor and sparkling clean toilet). The bath tub and the shower room as I call it were also very very clean. The shower room is very small. So small that I cant turn around with ease. Nevertheless, after cleaning my thing with the “toilet roll” for the first time in my life, I came back to my room and had a visual treat! We had a snowfall in the night and the houses and the cars were laden with snow. It was as if I was in a fairyland.

I really could not stop myself from clicking a few photographs from the window. The snow had got converted to ice and the temperature was 1.5 degree Celsius. Very, very cold!

After getting ready, it was the time for breakfast. The table was fully laid and ready for me to sit and hog my cereal for the breakfast. I had a cereal which was quite different to corn flakes, but very good to taste. After eating it, drank a glass of orange juice (real orange juice without any sugar, very tangy in taste!)

Then me and my colleague Pali to drop us to our customer's office. On the way to the office, we had to withdraw money and asked him to take us to a Visa ATM. He took us to the Buxtehude city center. The shops in the city center will open only at 9 AM and we saw the shutters and the amazing hoardings of many shops. The market area is very clean and very good. All the buildings seemed to have been built atleast a century ago. The Deutsche Bank ATM gave me my 1000 Euros and we left for the office.

The drive in the Mercedes Benz of Pali is just amazing. The vehicle is …. I don’t have words to say. One thing that I observed on my way to the office is the road discipline here. People follow the lane disciple with all the ‘bhakti’ they have. I never saw anybody changing lanes to overtake, or to break the signals. The thought came to my mind was “Who told these people to follow the rules so strictly?” but yes, the number of vehicles on the road were as much as we will have the density of traffic on Bannerghatta road at around 11:30 PM. Even at that time in our own Bannerghatta road, people just want to get away from the roads to their destinations as early as possible and they don’t hesitate to break the beautiful laws of our country.

Anyway, the rules apart, the drive in the Benz was the best thing that would happen there everyday.

The work in the office was very hectic and we had lot of work to do in the very tight schedule. But we succeeded in completing more than what we had planned and finished our work at around 8 in the night. Pali picked us up from the office and on the way back to his place, he took us about 2 kilometers away from his place to a locality where about 1000 people stay. This locality once used to be Hitler's camp for his men to stay. About 5000 people stayed in the camp during the World War II and then this has almost been demolished and now a posh locality has come up.

There are still people in the neighborhood of this locality who support Hitler's ideologies and it seems they don't hesitate to assault a person who is not from their race. Yaav kaaldal idaaro pa jana.. thu

Pali advised us not venture out in the dark near his place too fearing the language and the racism problem. 20 kms from Buxtehude is a place call Stade. Hitler gathered around 6000 Israelis in this place and 'gassed' them to death. I got to know the story only after Pali told me. [Forgive me, my history knowledge is less than poor]

Thus ended my second day in Germany leaving me to think about my friend Hitler and his story. I will learn the history of this country and share it with you one day. Keep waiting. Gute Nacht [Good night in German]