Love at first sight!

The Lufthansa aircraft landed in Frankfurt early in the morning at 7:30 AM, German time. The first aerial view of the roads and the city was splendid. The dirtiest of the things here look as the neatest things for me. The much-hyped immigration check was done within a minute for me and I was permitted to enter Germany!

The Frankfurt airport is so so so huge that I think about 20 or 30 HAL airports would fit in it. Our HAL airport has about 6 to 7 gates I think. But this one has areas A, B and C each of which has 65 Gates!
Yes, it is that huge! The shops inside the airport were so attractive that I felt like finishing my shopping there itself. The whole airport has over 200 shops that sell everything under the sun! Whew, this was too much for me. My perception about an airport was that of our own soon-to-be-closed HAL airport.

Varied people from all the classes, races and regions were hurriedly moving around to catch their flights. The gate from which my aircraft to Hamburg would let in passengers was A13. There is a subway that one has to go through to reach the A area. The sub way is just amazing. There are 4 lanes for people to walk in. The two extreme lanes have these escalators (I dont know the exact word, forgive me for that) which move on the ground so that the people dont have to walk. I felt that it was made just for people like me. Trust me, even though I tried to find a speck of dust or dirt, I could not. I dont know if the people are so sensible or the cleaning department is just amazing! Both of these are definitely needed for our country, the former being more predominantly required.

The breakfast in the flight was not enough and we were hungry. Time for us to search for vegetarian food. People here dont understand what is vegetarian. We have to specifically tell them that we want something that has no meat, no fish and no chicken as they consider red meat to be meat.

Finally, we managed to find a shop that had something that had only vegetables and cheese along with bread. Yes, the raw vegetable sandwich. There was also a kind of sandwichy-burger called Fraukachu (I dont know the spelling, but thats how its pronounced). I bought it and it tasted good. It was a bun which had a few vegetables, a cheese spread and a leafy vegetable between it.

Waiting for some more time in the awesome airport, we were ready to get into another Lufthansa aircraft which was to take us to Hamburg. The one hour journey was very pleasant to Hamburg with my German female co-passenger :) Unfortunately, she fell asleep soon after the flight took off from the ground and woke up almost when we had reached the destination. The sight of the clouds and the aerial view of Hamburg during the landing was splendid. I could not stop myself from thinking about the various flight phases an aircraft will have. My client manufactures aircrafts and our project deals with these modules that fetch the avionics parameters to the aircraft.

We waited for about 20 minutes to get our checked in baggages and Pali was standing at the gate to give us a very warm welcome. It was indeed very warm inside his Mercedes Benz. The temperature in Hamburg was around 5 degrees and the 2006 model Benz gave all the comfort that was needed. Pali fulfilled my dream of sitting in the car, Thanks man!

The 80 kilometer drive to Buxtehude took just 35 minutes and we were at Pali's place to freshen up and get ready to reach our customer's office. Their home is a 4 bedroom house thats not so very big, but its very cozy. The room that I was given is their elder daughter's who now is studying in London. After having bread and juice, we left for the office. I was to 'face' the customer for the first time in my life. Yes, I was a bit tensed but the excitement was more than the tension.

We went into the reception and showed the invitation letter and then met our point of contact at the customer's office and he led us to the 'Testrig' to show us the setup for our system that we were to test in the ensuing days.

We called Pali at around 7'o clock and he came within minutes to pick us up from the office. The temperature was 3 degrees! Kusum had prepared a very tasty-srilankan touch-dinner. She usually prepares 2 or 3 kinds of rice and 3 to 4 kinds of curries. The readily available yoghurt is the last part of the dinner. The non vegetarians relish her dishes a lot. Everyday, she prepares something new for them. As for us, its the same curry with a different vegetable. But, the taste of the food is nothing less to that of a good hotel in Bangalore.

The first day in Germany was too much for me to take. The cleanliness of the cities, the road discipline of the people, the hospitality offered by the Pali's... all just left me dumb struck.