Sunday, March 02, 2008

My first international experience.

It has been just two days , but then these two days are probably the days that i wont forget soon. Sitting here infront of the window , munching these raffels and looking at the ice melting down the green sheets , i feel like Wordsworth looking at daffodils :) ..... i might not be that poetic , but this place is probably one of the best for people who love the chill and cold. you have so much ice that it can probably solve bangalore's water problem ( this is an example of how bad my poetic skills can be :) ).

When i boarded the lufthansa flight to frankfurt , i was a bit tensed. My first flight out of the country , a host of countries to cross and a long 10 hr flight didnt make me feel any comfortable. However , the treatment in the flight was very good and the flight was awesome. I dont know how comfortable the business and the first classes would be, but the economy class in itself was good. The flight attendants , mostly german , were cordial. The first snack that was served was very tasty and i tasted wine for the first time. When the lady sitting next to me ordered red wine , i felt i should atleast go for some white wine. Though , it was difficult to start , the taste began to sink in after some time. I expected a short severe kick , as they show in the movies , but it was absolutely nthin. I had some payasam , upma , idli sambar , yogurt and bread with butter and jam in addition to a very good tea (well it is a long list , but i didnt put on much weight :) ) .

However , everything didnt happen as smoothly as i expected, especially at the frankfurt airport. It is a huge one and there is every chance that you might get lost if you dont read the signs properly. To my advantage ,there wasnt a big crowd at the immigration check and the german who asked me a couple of questions , though was a bit curt , was good enough to add a thank you , unlike his Indian counter part at the bangalore airport who didnt even acknowledge a thanks from my side. The airport was good and had a vast mix of nationalities . My connecting flight to Helsinki got delayed by an hour and a half thanks to the weather. The time was 1:30 PM (German) and it has already been 30 hrs since i last cleaned my teeth. There was some chewing gum in a box in the rest room ,to clean the teeth , however i could not understand how to get one out. After an hour and after some struggle with the language , i came to know from one of the cleaners that i need to put in a euro in the machine to get the gum . However, as they say nthin is easy till it happens and i didnt have any coins with me. I had to ask the old finnish lady sitting infront of me at the airport for some change and after using some sign language and some sound i was able to get the sufficient change to by myself a chewing gum tooth brush.

I took a table with a nice view of the airport and started chewing that gum , when a chinki came and sat infront of me. I didnt notice him at first, but after sometime when I looked at him , he gave me a warm nice smile and in his typical boom boom english he asked " u from India ? ". I said yeah i am from India. His next question was " you good at software / hardware " . I smiled at his question as it gave me an impression that half the world thinks that Software skills are ingrained into Indians by birth , I said i work on SW. He said "Yooou from Bangalore ? " . I know that bangalore is famous but didnt expect such a question from a Vietnamese that too in a lonely corner in frankfurt airport. I asked him if he knows bangalore , to which he replied " of course every one knows bangaaaaaaalore , hyyyderaaaaaabad. yooou guys are faaaaamous." . I later came to know that he is Mr. Vu from USA , emigratted to US after the Vietnam war and i found that he has a very good knowledge about everything that is going round the world. Right from the iraq war to the poor infrastructure in Inida , to the past , to what to do with my life , to his experiences with life we discussed a lot of things till our flight arrived.

On board , the airbus flying to Helsinki , i had a lot of finnish guys for my company. I had some pasta , milk chocolate , and apple juice ... the guys from lufthansa were pretty good and overall flight was comfortable. The first thing one would notice when one lands at Vanta , Helsinki is the sudden change in temperature. The airport was more or less like Bangalore's in size , but was pretty neat and clean . I took a taxi from the airpro counter and reached home , ofcourse not before some nice walk in the snow that was coming down strongly. A nice cozy mattress made me realize that i hadn't slept enough in the past 36 hrs and off i went into the bed , of course after cleaning my teeth, using the tooth paste in the check in bag :) .

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