I had boarded an Air India flight on 2nd October 2002. Along with two other girls from the English Department of Mumbai University, I was going to fly so far off from my family for the first time. There was apprehension, there was fear, there was joy, and there were butterflies in the stomach. We were going to stay in an East German city called Magdeburg. Otto-von-Guericke University had an exchange program with the Mumbai University, and that was the reason we were going to Germany. We were going there on a scholarship for 5 months and were going to attend lectures there.
I had studied German for Masters, and I had a fair idea about the country and the culture and the people and, most importantly, the language. I could speak it fluently, and I became the translator and interpreter for the other two girls. We landed in the afternoon at Berlin Tegel Airport, and one professor had come to pick us from the airport. He took us to the place where we were supposed to live, and there we met our contact from the university, Katharina. She had brought us a few essential things like bread, jam, yogurt, milk, cheese, etc. We talked a little, and she promised to take us around the next day as we were tired due to a long journey. We were staying in an almost empty hotel on the outskirts of the city.
Only our rooms were occupied, there was no one else in the hotel that day. It felt like a haunted place with no noise and no habitation. We put the luggage in our rooms. They were in a double bedroom, and I was in a single room. We decided to have a short walk around the hotel. We had spotted a telephone booth and wanted to inform our parents about our safe arrival. There were no mobiles with us at that time, and calling foreign countries was a very costly affair. In a hurry to call, we went different ways and lost the way back to the hotel. It was just a few hours there, and those two girls were somewhere else, and I came back to the hotel after some time as I had remembered the way correctly. I could read the signs and recognized the landmarks. I waited for the other two girls, and they came huffing and puffing after some time. We decided never to leave each other from now on. We ate the food Katharina had got and slept off.
The next day was the German Reunification Day, it was a holiday in Germany. Everything was closed. We went around the city and saw a few shops and cafes open. We went to a Pizzeria and had Pizza. We ate with our hands, and others were staring at us. It was not common to eat Pizza with hands in Germany. And we didn't know how to eat Pizza with a knife and fork. On our way back, we found a joint for Chinese fried rice, and that was our savior. We almost ate food from that joint in 1 Euro. Sometimes we ate fried rice with eggs, sometimes noodles and sometimes we ate bread with butter and the "thecha" which we carried from Mumbai. We sang songs to kill time. We put our own lines in an old song, "tumko dekha to ye khayal aaya, zindagi dhoop tum ghana saaya." We changed it to "Magdeburg main aake ye khayaal aaya, sannate ka yahan ghana saaya." We cracked silly jokes and laughed at our own selves. The silence was killing us actually, and it was just the second day there.
Slowly, the university classes started and we met a few people who became our friends. We made many student trips together on weekends. We met a few Indians there with whom we got along very well. They were doing their Ph.D. there, and they knew the city. They showed us around, helped us shop, and took care of us like elder siblings. We often cooked and ate together. We hated staying in the hotel, so we spent most of the time outside and went only to sleep at night. We visited many cities like Berlin, Potsdam, Leipzig but never went outside Germany. That was because I had gone there on a wrong visa. I was given a visa as a scientist and was not allowed to have a multiple entry visa. So we never could go outside Germany. The visa got canceled after a month, and I got a new visa of a student there, but still, I don't know why we didn't go out of Germany. We stayed on in Magdeburg and visited the nearby cities and towns only.
The other two girls came back to Mumbai on 31st December, and I shifted with a German family as their paying guest. The host mother was very kind and loving, and she had known about India earlier. Her elder son had stayed with an Indian family in the USA. Her sister-in-law had adopted a boy from India when her brother-in-law was serving in the German Embassy in Chennai. We got along very well, and we often cooked together, went for a walk together. She took me to her school one day, and I met a colleague of hers who turned out to be a long lost friend of my lady professor who taught me German at Mumbai University. She took the contact of my professor, and I gave her the e-mail id of my professor. They reconnected after many years!
The season in which we came to Germany was not the best time to come. The autumn was beautiful. The orange, yellow leaves left me wanting for me. In Winter, it snowed, it was cold, it was sunny sometimes but with minus 25 degrees. In the beginning, it was a little lonely, but after a few days, the silence, the solitude, the cleanliness, the personal space started appealing. We missed our friends and family back home. We just wrote e-mails and had to go to a Cybercafe to check them. We gave missed calls to our families when we thought about them or missed them. We got invited by many of our German friends at home for coffee and cake and sometimes for dinner. We also cooked Indian food for them many times. The food was very different here. We couldn't eat bread every day or non-vegetarian food here. But we managed to survive. It was a carefree time with no responsibilities.
Being a student in Germany gives you many concessions. Student pass for the local transport and also for the different museums and historical places makes it easy for students to study and also visit cities. We met many good people in Magdeburg. We can never forget the help which Michael, Sina, Sussane, Dagmar, and Annika offered us. Annika took us home at Christmas with her family and was a superb host. I am still in touch with my host mother and a few German friends. Annika had even visited me in 2003 in Mumbai. I sadly lost touch with the other two girls with whom I had really bonded so well and had a great time together in Germany.
This was my first experience with Germany. I hadn't imagined that I would come again and again to Germany after 2002. I went for a translation course in 2003, and then from 2010, I have regularly been coming for short and long intervals. 17 years have passed after that first trip to Germany, and I hadn't imagined that I would be so closely bonded with it and it's people now. The culture is very different, it is very individualistic, very personal. One needs to adapt to it and keep oneself busy with things that one likes.
Things change time changes. Cities change, people change. Only the memories remain constant.
I had studied German for Masters, and I had a fair idea about the country and the culture and the people and, most importantly, the language. I could speak it fluently, and I became the translator and interpreter for the other two girls. We landed in the afternoon at Berlin Tegel Airport, and one professor had come to pick us from the airport. He took us to the place where we were supposed to live, and there we met our contact from the university, Katharina. She had brought us a few essential things like bread, jam, yogurt, milk, cheese, etc. We talked a little, and she promised to take us around the next day as we were tired due to a long journey. We were staying in an almost empty hotel on the outskirts of the city.
Only our rooms were occupied, there was no one else in the hotel that day. It felt like a haunted place with no noise and no habitation. We put the luggage in our rooms. They were in a double bedroom, and I was in a single room. We decided to have a short walk around the hotel. We had spotted a telephone booth and wanted to inform our parents about our safe arrival. There were no mobiles with us at that time, and calling foreign countries was a very costly affair. In a hurry to call, we went different ways and lost the way back to the hotel. It was just a few hours there, and those two girls were somewhere else, and I came back to the hotel after some time as I had remembered the way correctly. I could read the signs and recognized the landmarks. I waited for the other two girls, and they came huffing and puffing after some time. We decided never to leave each other from now on. We ate the food Katharina had got and slept off.
The next day was the German Reunification Day, it was a holiday in Germany. Everything was closed. We went around the city and saw a few shops and cafes open. We went to a Pizzeria and had Pizza. We ate with our hands, and others were staring at us. It was not common to eat Pizza with hands in Germany. And we didn't know how to eat Pizza with a knife and fork. On our way back, we found a joint for Chinese fried rice, and that was our savior. We almost ate food from that joint in 1 Euro. Sometimes we ate fried rice with eggs, sometimes noodles and sometimes we ate bread with butter and the "thecha" which we carried from Mumbai. We sang songs to kill time. We put our own lines in an old song, "tumko dekha to ye khayal aaya, zindagi dhoop tum ghana saaya." We changed it to "Magdeburg main aake ye khayaal aaya, sannate ka yahan ghana saaya." We cracked silly jokes and laughed at our own selves. The silence was killing us actually, and it was just the second day there.
Slowly, the university classes started and we met a few people who became our friends. We made many student trips together on weekends. We met a few Indians there with whom we got along very well. They were doing their Ph.D. there, and they knew the city. They showed us around, helped us shop, and took care of us like elder siblings. We often cooked and ate together. We hated staying in the hotel, so we spent most of the time outside and went only to sleep at night. We visited many cities like Berlin, Potsdam, Leipzig but never went outside Germany. That was because I had gone there on a wrong visa. I was given a visa as a scientist and was not allowed to have a multiple entry visa. So we never could go outside Germany. The visa got canceled after a month, and I got a new visa of a student there, but still, I don't know why we didn't go out of Germany. We stayed on in Magdeburg and visited the nearby cities and towns only.
The other two girls came back to Mumbai on 31st December, and I shifted with a German family as their paying guest. The host mother was very kind and loving, and she had known about India earlier. Her elder son had stayed with an Indian family in the USA. Her sister-in-law had adopted a boy from India when her brother-in-law was serving in the German Embassy in Chennai. We got along very well, and we often cooked together, went for a walk together. She took me to her school one day, and I met a colleague of hers who turned out to be a long lost friend of my lady professor who taught me German at Mumbai University. She took the contact of my professor, and I gave her the e-mail id of my professor. They reconnected after many years!
The season in which we came to Germany was not the best time to come. The autumn was beautiful. The orange, yellow leaves left me wanting for me. In Winter, it snowed, it was cold, it was sunny sometimes but with minus 25 degrees. In the beginning, it was a little lonely, but after a few days, the silence, the solitude, the cleanliness, the personal space started appealing. We missed our friends and family back home. We just wrote e-mails and had to go to a Cybercafe to check them. We gave missed calls to our families when we thought about them or missed them. We got invited by many of our German friends at home for coffee and cake and sometimes for dinner. We also cooked Indian food for them many times. The food was very different here. We couldn't eat bread every day or non-vegetarian food here. But we managed to survive. It was a carefree time with no responsibilities.
Being a student in Germany gives you many concessions. Student pass for the local transport and also for the different museums and historical places makes it easy for students to study and also visit cities. We met many good people in Magdeburg. We can never forget the help which Michael, Sina, Sussane, Dagmar, and Annika offered us. Annika took us home at Christmas with her family and was a superb host. I am still in touch with my host mother and a few German friends. Annika had even visited me in 2003 in Mumbai. I sadly lost touch with the other two girls with whom I had really bonded so well and had a great time together in Germany.
This was my first experience with Germany. I hadn't imagined that I would come again and again to Germany after 2002. I went for a translation course in 2003, and then from 2010, I have regularly been coming for short and long intervals. 17 years have passed after that first trip to Germany, and I hadn't imagined that I would be so closely bonded with it and it's people now. The culture is very different, it is very individualistic, very personal. One needs to adapt to it and keep oneself busy with things that one likes.
Things change time changes. Cities change, people change. Only the memories remain constant.
No comments:
Post a Comment