Ain't I just the perfect food loving social animal? ;-)

I must say, today was a very satisfying day for my stomach. I started off with buttery toast for breakfast, and the people who know me, can vouch when I say that breakfast for me is indeed a luxury! Lunch was a 3 course meal beginning with the usual salad and then a soup made of onions, chives and asparagus at the institute cafeteria. Yes, I took the soup only cuz it reminded me of the onion & chive cream cheese from Einstein Bros. Bagels. ;) You know you're missing something dearly when the most mundane things from back home prop up in your new place of inhabitance AND bring a smile to your face. French fries!! I didn't know I miss them so much till I saw fries for lunch today and that too with mayo and ketchup!  My first bite of those crispy, hot, salty fries dipped in Heinz tomato ketchup was enough to make my day go from ordinary to awesome! :-P All those freshman year memories of hogging fries in the Commons came rushing back and I found myself loving fries all the more. Oh, and did I forget the cheese? The grated Parmesan cheese on top of my rotini pasta was heavenly! The butter and cheese here taste really different. The butter is not salted and the cheese is creamy. Perfect, if you ask me! End it with upma and nutella for dinner and dessert respectively, and you get a very happy stomach!

I didn't mean to make most of you hungry but you see, food is always a problem anywhere I go. There are some people who can eat anything and everything and yet manage to stay healthy. I'm definitely not one of those. I am a vegetarian who doesn't eat eggs but hey I just found out today the German version of mac n cheese that I loved - kaese spaetzle, is a pasta made of eggs. Well, whatever. :-P

I socialized a bit today and that's how I found out the ingredients of kaese spaetzle, haha. You see, the way the dorms are built here is, each floor has 2 apartments with 7/8 rooms in each apartment. Every student gets their own tiny room and instead of roommates, one has flatmates. There is one tiny addition, though. These two apartments are connected via the common bathrooms and the kitchen balcony, which means that each floor is one big house of 15 or so people. Although one would expect the house to be thriving with activity, it's pretty quiet where people don't "hang out" with their flatmates, rather just "bump into" each other while using the bathroom or the kitchen. So when puny little Shefali got too bored of staying in her own room without meeting any new people, she decided to go and knock on people's doors! Don't judge me; I work with people aged 26 or more from 9am - 5pm every day and it would be pretty pathetic if I ended up hanging out with them even in the evenings. I don't attend classes where I can interact with my classmates or don't even go downhill to the university. Here are the stats - Tubingen is the youngest city in Germany in terms of the median age of its inhabitants. Max Planck is the oldest area in Tubingen. So there. My point being, my dorms are the only place where I can find people my age and what better way to break the ice than "love thy neighbor"! ;-) My flatmates are pretty  interesting. We ended up getting everyone out of their rooms, except one(who is not in town) into the kitchen to have a nice talk and apparently all of them had never had a sit down talk with the rest before! It was the first time that each of them was seeing the other 6 together! Most of them know a little or broken english which I considered encouraging because I could at least communicate. An interesting thing that one of the girls pointed out was that none of us except the missing person, were German natives. My flatmates are from Poland, Nepal, Yemen, Russia, Oregon and last obviously is the German I haven't met till now . So, it's very diverse and great for me to practice my German when I get back from Berlin! I even got to know a few people from the opposite flat while just hanging out in the kitchen balcony (it's pretty huge and the view is great!) Oh I'm sorry I don't have a picture of that view! Next post, definitely. One of the guys called Matt is on a year and a half long exchange program from Oregon!! He's doing his Computer Science degree in German. How cool is that?!

What impresses me most is the fact that Germans study all their life in their native language. They even go to university in German but they still have a good command over English. It's almost as if they are forced to study English for the sake of international ease. They can communicate scientifically and that too comfortably in both German and English without having to take any English as a Second Language (ESL) course like some of the other Asian countries. I wish India would stop imitating the Brits so much especially in terms of language. It's been 65 years, why wouldn't you develop some originality already! That reminds me, haha, after each of my parents had separately inquired what the other Indians were doing around me, my brother had to ask - "So, what about the other Indians? Have you met any? What are they doing?" I ask, "What are they doing about what?". All I get back is, "In general, you know...". I have to say at this point, please, please, PLEASE understand this thoroughly people: Indians are no longer a niche nationality who you can cling on to for help when in a foreign land. Thanks to our over exploding population, we have gotten sucked into the race called Humans, if you know what I mean. Wherever there are humans, you are bound to find stores, toilets, houses, and Indians! If you want to know how to manage or settle in a foreign land, it's as good as asking any international who you can talk comfortably with. Nothing exclusive there. Now, if you ask me, "So, did you find any Indian restaurant or an Indian grocery store?", then that would be saying something! :-P
But yeah, the Indian who lives in the opposite flat is an M.Phil student from Pune University studying English Literature. Now that I think of it, I haven't come across many Maharashtrians who love English to the extent that they have taken it up as a career choice and come to Germany for an exchange program in English! He was very amused and relieved to find a co-Marathi speaker living in the house so I guess I made someone's day! :-)

Oh, Today, you were so eventful. I finally finished the first project that I was assigned to do ever since I came here. It took 2.5 working days and by the end of it, my computer was so hot and tired, MATLAB kept freezing and my 2 second compilation took 397 seconds. That's when I knew I had to pack up and leave! ;) It's kinda tricky sometimes cuz neither Philipp nor Chris have given me a specific time to leave. I know I'm expected to be there at 9am but do I just leave at 5 or wait till I've shown them my stuff? They don't even show signs of caring, lol. Today, both of them just left before me like it didn't matter to them how long I stayed there for, as long as I was at work tomorrow at 9am! But yeah, I missed my bio breakfast today cuz I had to go to the "Alien's Office" popularly known here as "Burger amt." No, sadly they don't serve burgers there. I even looked. :-P I'm now a registered resident of Tubingen, Germany. Apparently every "alien" has to get it done upon arrival in a German city. I wonder if they would even make E.T. get it done...or Paul, or whatever they're calling those creatures nowadays. Bio breakfast happens every Tuesday morning at 9 where our entire lab gets together for breakfast and someone presents an interesting paper that they might have recently read. That's one other thing about labs here - they're so social. I have lunch with at least 8 people from lab everyday and have played foosball with them twice out of the 4 days that I went to work. People talk, laugh, chit chat, play and work together. Oh yeah, I found out that the knocking the table thing that I mentioned last time, is a substitute for an applause used at most places in Germany. It's really good exercise for the wrists, foosball. You know you have those phases in your life where you just can't get enough of a game? For me, it's foosball phase now. :-P

Tomorrow, my Nepalese flatmate will take me to the African store from where I can buy Indian masalas. Sounds dodgy? You bet!

Cheers!

P.S. If you're wondering where my pictures went, look back at the text. Do you really think it would've been a good idea to put pictures of my food and of random people(read: new flatmates) on my blog? I'm sorry, I felt too awkward to ask them for pictures for my blog, the first time I met them, and hence, didn't. :-P