Advaita: Home Away From Home:On why India Should Have Germans Running Their Transport System !!

Every Indian human being’s journey always stars the same, and I mean ALWAYS!

What with the usual flock(or should i say parade?) of adoring parents , aunts , cousins , nieces, nephews and every other person you know who lives within a one mile radius of your house waiting patiently to bid you farewell for the next two weeks or so. Some of them may have even brought along their own thalis and drishti sets to ensure the safety of whomever’s travelling during the flight.

Frankly speaking that’s how everything is in India. All your problems, warnings, pleadings, worries, they all are gone with a wave of a lamp around your face and a couple of blessings from your elders or any other wizened looking person standing beside you.

It’s all very simple here.

You see cows on the road? You honk your horn or yell profanities till they get up off the roads and move themselves on to block the next one.

You public transportation isn’t on time? You jump on the next thing which has at least two wheels and a motor till you reach either your destination or another host whose poor vehicle you can invade.

In India your solution isn’t in complicated looking plans or extensive, mind-boggling ideas. It lies rather in the next big (or small, depends on what you want,) thing you see around. Here you adapt, quite literally, to your surroundings.

We Indians live in a simple society thus, we Indians ARE simple. We think simple. Act simple. But we eat complicated :D!

And it was with such profound simplicity that the brave 18 of us got out of the Munich airport and into a whole new world which was to be our adopted home for the next two week of our lives.

If you would have asked me how Germany was at that exact moment I wouldn’t have been able to give you an answer. Because:

a) My mouth was hanging open as I stared at the wide openness outside the Munich airport as I took in the countryside-ish surrounds.

b) It was so cold that I don’t think my mouth would have moved much because my jaw seemed like it was frozen in place.

c) All the noise and hugging around me seemed unusually out of place for such a quite looking country and it was hard taking my eyes away from all that activity to actually think a reply for any question.

So, I just stood there.

At the enterance of the Munich airport.

With my bags flopped around me on the floor and a dumb expression on my face.

That was when I spotted a flurry of blond hair making her way through the crowd and towards me. I closed my mouth (with a lot of effort) Picked my bag up and wobbled towards the familiar looking figure who was now waving at me quite enthusiastically.

I waved back shyly because I wasn’t really sure if it was me she was waving to.

I reached her.

“Advaita? Is that you?” blond girl asked.

“Yeah.” I said as my power of thought hadn’t fully returned to me yet.

We stared at each other for a second before she gave me an awkward hug.

That was enough to make me figure it all out.

“Oh my god! JULIA????” I all but yelled as I hugged her back again. I drew back to see the face of a slightly scared looking Julia who seemed surprised to find me actually talking now.

“Wait a sec! I have the most important question in the world before you say anything else.” I said. Holding her hands to make sure she doesn’t run away from me just yet. “Is your name pronounced with a ‘Jay’ or a ‘Yu’??”

“It’s pronounced with a ‘Yu’” smiled Julia. I smiled too happy to know that she was warming up to my weirdness a little.

She grabbed my trolley and we waited for the cabbie to load our luggage into the space.

“Wow I’m so excited that you’re finally here.” She said, ruffling through her small handbag. “Here, I bought you a pretzel!” she handed me a brown paper bag.

I opened it to find a little bread-like thingy wrapped in tissue. I broke off a little piece of it and put it cautiously in my mouth and chewed.

“Soooo?? Do you like it?” she looked apprehensive.

I nodded slowly as I took another bite of the salty pretzel just to reassure her.

She seemed satisfied with my answer so we got into the bus just as it started.

We sat at the back and the reminder of the little ride passed in a flurry of green and brown and conversations which i was just too tired to actually pay attention to.

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I was politely nudged awake from my little nap by Julia as she smiled from beside me.

“Were here at the school. My parents are waiting for us right there.” She said pointing to a lady and a man, standing in the crowd outside, trying to get a little peek of the inside of the bus.

I looked just as Julia’s mom turned her head towards my window and saw me.

I waved at her and she waved back.

I got down and collected my bags as my German counterparts made their way towards me from the crowd.

Gabie's the one in blue!

“Oh! Advaita we are so happy to see you.” The woman said. She had blond hair which was of a lighter shade than Julia’s and bright blue eyes. The tall man beside her had a hand slung around Julia’s shoulder and all three of them were grinning from ear to ear.

“I am Gabi Julia’s mother and this is her father Harry.”

We all shook each other’s hands and exchanged the usual round of politeries and Mr. Forster helped me with my luggage.

It was a short ride to her house that seemed even shorter to a girl like me as I was trying to absorb every little bit of the insanely dream-like outside that was Augsburg. Everywhere you turned there were charming little cafe’s and quaint shops and brilliantly coloured flowerbeds that jutted out from beneath windows of almost every house.

We reached home and I was unpacking as Julia came in and asked me if i wanted to do something. I jumped at the opportunity and asked her if she could show me around the city and she obliged me by taking me there. We walked through the supermarket and waited for the most amazing piece of human engineering-the tram- which took us to the heart of Augsburg city.

I gotta tell you all out there something, if you ever manage to go to Germany in your life this is one rule you HAVE GOT to pay heed to – WALK wherever and whenever you get the chance to because in a place like Germany every corner holds wonderful surprises that you would definitely miss if you had stayed inside a vehicle. Be it mouth watering ice cream shops that are hidden in narrow folds of the alleyways, or street performances that range from aweSUM to awFUL . Walking, one could say, is as a part of German culture as domestic animals on roads are to Indians.

Street performers Ahoy ;)

And we did exactly that. We walked everywhere. From malls to the city halls to churches to creepy parks to souvenir shops. We walked until we could walk no more and then some. We walked until it got dark, when Julia finally decided that it was time to get me inside her house coz I looked like I was gonna drop down unconscious any second.

We got back at a time which still looked like an Indian evening to me but was actually 10 o’clock in the night. Gabi asked me if I wanted anything to eat to which i merely shook my head and pointed at my stomach willing her with my mind to understand that i was saying ‘no, thank you’ in my own made up sign language. She seemed to get it after five minutes of watching my funny mime act when Julia came back from here shower and laughingly explained to her about the embarrassing episode of me stuffing my face with hot chocolate chip ice cream earlier that evening.

“So you like ice cream?” She asked eagerly standing at the entrance of the bedroom as i flopped onto my bed.

“Yeah.” Was all i could manage before my head hit the pillow and it was lights out in my head.

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I woke up next morning to find a fridge stuffed with ice cream of all shapes and sizes.

Oh my god, could these people get any sweeter?

“My mom got them for you coz you told her that you like ice cream.” Julia said from between eating her breakfast.

“Seriously?”

She smiled a yes.

It was our first day of school and i was exited to the point of gobbling up my toast in two bites.

“We have to go in two minutes.”

I nodded and excused myself to the bathroom.

There i saw something which would have alarmed me more than the scenario of Julia popping in there and telling me that the world was gonna end in fifty seconds and that the first thing in the world to disappear were gummy bears.

I stood there staring at the neat little white roll with fear and repulsion as if it was some kind of alien that had suddenly dropped down onto earth.

And the truth finally slammed into me making me take a step back.

My exact thought at that time was this:

Oh shit! Toilet paper!

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Walking into Maria Ward Gymnasium felt like walking into some kind of state of the art museum. Everywhere you looked there were trendy looking flat screens hanging from the ceilings showing the days schedule for the students who scuttled past each other in the shiny floored hallways that I was sure did not contain even a speck of dust.

We were shown into our respective classrooms where we sat with our partners listening to the various teachers proving their expertise in a language which was completely foreign to me. If you would have said that they pixies spoke that language I would have believed you because it was fascinating how a language could be propagated with so much emotion even when one was talking about chemicals and the numbers of moles in them.

The day passed on pretty blithely and without much activity as did the next couple of ones.

Don’t get me wrong we had our fair share of city tours, and map given route tracings, and shopping with friends and camera(and other gadget) losings but somehow I felt like I was waiting for that moment to arrive which would be the single most precious memory that I would forever remember Germany and Augsburg by.

And come it did.

It was one of those unpredictable spaces in time where you just HAVE to be a part of all the action to get the whole point of why you ever did it in the first place.

And for me it came whilst I was sitting strapped to a padded double seat along with my fellow daredevil Simran.

Spinning upside down and back.

Thirteen storeys up in the air.

Screaming our hearts out in the heavy German downpour that left us drenched to our bones and shivering due to the biting cold.

We were the last in line for the ride since the others had gone away because of the rain. What seemed like a pretty harmless ride soon proved to us how first impressions could be so drastically wrong.

The ride started up and we were lithely lifted into the air by the powerful machines as we waited for the pair below us to get strapped into the harnesses too.

“Sie beide Geldstrafe bis es?“ (Both of you fine up there?) Asked the burley man below.

I turned to look at a wild looking Simran whose grin seemed to be as big as my own.

We both smirked at each other.“JA!!“ we yelled back to the people below. The tiny dot who i supposed was the operator gave us a thumbs up before going into his little shed. We waited for the ride to finally start. I kept waving my legs about enjoying the view of the blue sky underneath them as we were currently upside down when suddenly we heard a thundering roar and saw a streak of white above my head.Water started dropping from the blueness above me as the engines started and i dropped to the ground at a dizzying speed. I heard my own deafening scream mixed with Simran’s as we were flipped around and brought back to the sky.

The ride had officially started.

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That Sunday was a beautiful spot in my memory of Germany as I stood at the same place i did exactly two weeks ago when I arrived here.

The second week of mine in Augsburg somehow seemed to have flown by faster than you could say ‘I want a Durum’(which according to me is the yummiest thing I’ve tasted in my entire life, second only to the ice cream).

All i remembered were lots of blurred and distorted moments of fun, laughter and an overall good time.
Now I was standing in front of the same school and in front of the same bus which had brought me to this two week-long dream fourteen days ago.

I had that same dumb look and all the same luggage flopped around me, but there was something definitely a little different from the ’ me’ two weeks back.
Because the girl who stood there right now, saying teary goodbye’s to Julia and Gabi and Harry, - she had just gained a second place she could now call home.

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