Einladung zum Kegeln!

The past week has seen some really wonderful moments happen in my workplace. To begin with, one of my colleagues was leaving as her contract comes to a close and she is moving to Munich for another job. She threw a party at the Kegelbahn (bowling alley) at a place called Tennenlohe near Erlangen. And it was an amazing experience overall. Around 15 of us turned up, all colleagues in the lab – students , research workers, secretaries  and also one of our profs.  The atmosphere was warm and good, the service from the alley managers was splendid . We had some Asian food ordered from a nearby restaurant. There was a round of drinks then and later we started to bowl. We grouped ourselves randomly into 2 different teams  and played different varieties of games against each other  and paused in between to take pictures, drink some more and had a lot of fun.

Later after an hour, only the youngsters were bowling while the elders had retired to the seats for a relaxed evening chat among themselves. I had 3 other guys in my team and we played against the other team many more different variants – the one I enjoyed the most was where each team  goes for a hit one after the other in their own alley, but try to avoid scoring 11 points or multiples of 11 (22, 33,etc.) the aim is to reach 100 before the other team. It was real fun when one team would reach up to 87 and then someone would hit and make just one pin fall , and bring their team score to 88. And they have to start from 0 again!

Then it was time for her to open her gifts – we had packed it in a big plastic barrel from our labs and filled it up mostly with some waste papers and stuff ( to build up the surprise). Actually it turned out that I was the one who got surprised – by the choice of gifts here – Bockwurst, Bier and Amazon gift vouchers!

We went on bowling again till little after midnight and then I took a bus along with my friends back home .

The earlier day I had cooked a popular Indian dish called dosa (which strangely never appears in any of the menus of the Indian restaurants in Germany) along with sambar (a side dish) in my office kitchen and shared with my colleagues. They found it great but I was surprised as they said they expected some thing more spicy. In my enthusiasm to adjust it according to their tastes, I had made the sambar  considerably weaker by gong a little easy on the masalas. Later, I added some more of the spices and set it right and we all enjoyed a great lunch. They were obviously no strangers to Indian cuisine I understood. Particularly, I enjoyed sharing it with our secretary Ingrid, who is always very curious to know more about India and would google extensively about  anything I would narrate her! She said she would remember the word ‘dosa’ by associating it with the german word ‘dose’ (a box) to do her search on google at home.

Earlier our lab group had taken a 1 day tour of Nuremberg which I had forgot to mention in the previous article. I enjoyed it a lot and we had a great day. I took my cycle along in the regional train and you have to pay for the cycle through a child ticket (costs half as the adult ticket). We checked out the interesting castle and towers of Nuremberg, caught up on its history in the city museum (called Fembo house) and then visited a traditional house brewery and were taken on a guided tour of the beer cellars underground, then had lunch at a traditional inn, visited the Albrecht Durer (medieval time artist famous for his printed works and self-portraits) museum and rounded up the day with a relaxing drink at a small pub. Nuremberg is an amazing city – almost 70% of the buildings destroyed in the World War 2 but today it has been restored to such an amazing level that one can really not believe this city was in total shambles 60 years  ago. The city wall that covers the entire span of the Old City runs many kms long and is one of the main icons of the city. The trams, underground train networks, magnificient buildings, supermarkets, amazingly resotred medieval time churches, houses and castle towers all tell a wonderful tale of human spirit. I was amazed how people have built this city back to its historical glory, yes Nuremberg was a very very important trade centre during the medieval times, and popularly remarked as the place where goods from all over the world can be bought or sold.

Wednesdays and Thursdays are very hectic at the lab with many of the Masters students turning up for the practical sessions and it gets a bit crowded. I work around this situation by turning up early for the lab and finish my work as much as possible and then staying at my office with the studies and other paper work while the practical session is on.  I also see the buses crowded with school students at around 7 – 7:30 in the morning.  Friday was a long day at work with my colleague Christine. On the weekend I completed 2 things long pending – cleaning my room and getting a hair-cut. I found out that Friseur (hair dresser) could also be sometimes spelt as Frisör.