My stint at Deutschland- Chapter 3

By this time I had to start travelling, to Netherlands, Utrecht to be more precise, where our project was going on. It was not a very engaging thought to wake up in the morning at 4 AM in biting cold, take a bath (esp. when hot water does'nt run continuously), pack your bags and hop on to a taxi at 5.30 AM to catch a plane at 6 AM. But precisely those were the things that I had to do. And then for the whole day you sit with a bunch of clients who are still not very warm with you for various reasons. In the afternoon you sometimes have a rather tasteless lunch and yearn for that rice and curry which you miss. And then evening after everybody else in the office goes home, you call yourelf a taxi and go and check in at the hotel, take a shower and even though you are too tired to go out, drag yourself along to a nearby restaurant to have dinner, or else opt for the room service, and then blissfully go to sleep thinking what is awaiting you the next day.

The days when I was in Stuttgart were used to be good though. In the weekends I could have a stroll in Koenigstrasse watching merry crowd, take a bite or two in a MacDonald or a Doenor Kebap joint or simply seat at home and read a book. After I bought my first digital camera I went around taking snaps of almost anything and everything I liked.

I was taken for my first movie in Stuttgart by my colleagues in a small theatre called Europa, (which closed down soon after) where English movies were shown. There were'nt any multiplex in Stuttgart, just plain old fashioned "Kinos". The movie we watched was Gothica, starred by Halle Berry, and it was quit a forgettable one. On that night I travelled for the first time without tickets as I thought that the pass which was given to me after local registration and which was supposed to be valid only after it was endorsed by them, which I did not do, was a valid one. Fortunately there was no checking that night, else I would have been a "Schwarzfahrer" caught in the act and would have to cough up 40 euro. Fortunately that did not happen.

The other incident worth remembering during this time was my visit to Paderborn on an Easter weekend to meet Sujoyda and family who were staying there. Paderborn is almost 5 hours ICE journey from Stuttgart and I set off at 5.30 AM. On the previous night I got back from Utrecht, with a lot of difficulty. I was travelling with Ritu, my project manager, and Lutz Beck, my client side project manager. The KLM city hopper from Utrecht to Stuttgart was stuck by a lightning and got cancelled. Since we had a Europe class ticket, we were rebooked in a Lufthansa flight to Munich at 9 PM. While boarding the flight Ritu checked in his small bag containing all credit cards, and that bag did not arrive at Munich. So he panicked and got all his credit cards cancelled. Lutz drove us till Stuttgart from Muenchen in a rented car and we arrived at 3 AM. Ritu helped me in getting a taxi at 4 AM to go to the station. Goes without saying I slept all along in the train, only to wake up to change my train at Kassel.

Paderborn is a nice quiet sleepy town, and from there we took a trip to Cologne where I bought my digital camera. There we met Jagmeet Singh, the jovial colleague, who had come all the way from Toulouse (he was working there on an Airbus project) to meet Sujoyda. We had great fun together and the lunch and dinner prepared by Shibani (Sujoyda's wife) were simply marvellous. We also went to visit Neanderthal, the place were Neanderthal man's remnants were first to be found. And later we went to Atta-Hoehle, the stalactite cave. I have some photos of the trip here.

All good things come to an end and I had to return from Paderborn to Stuttgart and then go away again for a trip to Utrecht. When I returned, there was a surprise in store for me in the form of a letter from my agency stating that they cannot renew my house contract for the month(it was a monthly contract) and that they were providing me with alternate options. Much later I came to know from the same agency that I was literally driven out owing to the fact that I failed to keep the rooms clean. I always had this stupid notion that cleaning of rooms, like cleaning of bedsheets and pillow covers, was a duty of the landlady and she would engage somebody for doing the same, little knowing that in Germany no maid is employed for cleaning the rooms and that cleaning charge is very high. So it was my ignorance rather than deliberate neglect that led to my expulsion.

What happened next? Let me cover that in detail in the next chapter.