Locks over the Rhine

Another memorable experience was the visit to the French border.
The Rhine acts as a natural boundary between Alsatian France and German Baden Wurttemberg in these parts.
The trip to the border was uneventful except that I noticed that the autobahn (high speed motorway) had a lot of motorbike riders on that sunny day. It was quite hot for that summer, but they were all in the same stereotype boots, jacket and goggles pulled over their eyes.
Also I noticed that some of the cars had bicycles or small boats hauled on top of them. Families out on a boating trip perhaps, or simply cycling in the countryside enjoying an unusually hot summer, I guessed.
The first question that came to my mind was why the Rhine needed water locks. (The ones like those over the Panama/Suez canal). The answer is that at some sections the water is too rapid. I guess, too fast for a moderate sized boat or a tug to safely navigate.
The upriver boats enter the first lock whose floodgates are then closed and water fills in calculatedly through sluices. Once the water level nears the level of the upper body of the river, the lock is opened, water fills in, and the boat(s) continue on their journey.
And it is vice versa on the other lock.
There were a good many people on joy cruises in addition to the commercial tugboats.
Some pretty beauties on fancy boats were actually doing crew work.
Wow! Those beauties really knew their ropes.

Wine flows along the Rhine

One weekend proved to be a remarkable day in my life.
I drank wine - all kinds, red, white; beer- the works.
It happened so that an acquaintance I knew in Germany invited me to experience the fullness of a wine festival. He knew that I didn't drink but all the same I agreed to keep him company.
We went to nearby Sasbach, just four kilometers from France, on the banks of the picturesque Rhine that acts as the international border between French Alsace and German Baden-Wurttemberg.
When we arrived it was late night already but the festivities were just beginning. We saw quite a few sodden brunettes sitting bleary eyed by the sidewalk. Some of them ogled at me, perhaps because of my skin color.
Some sort of clubs had been formed at the wine festival and each club had its own stall where it offered its produce to visitors and locals as well.
Our first visit was to the stall run by the mayor of Sasbach. He proved to be a ruddy well built man who kept on offering us more and more of his wine, perhaps to give an alien the best Germany has to offer. I drank a lot but noticed that I was not getting any more drunk.
Then we had another shot of wine at the next stall complete with cherries at the bottom of the glass. The cherries too had partially fermented.
I was desperately hungry by this time so my friend and I went to a fast food stall. We were offered something that tasted like salted dried meat, accompanied with a bread loaf.
I found it extremely bland for my taste. No better than chomping at a tramp's disintegrating shoes.
Soon the place was filling up with people. I had never seen so many people together at one place in these rural parts. A musician was playing on his string instrument in accompaniment to an Italian folk song.
Soon some of the people were up on the benches and were chanting and singing and dancing. The crowed roared in approval when one octogenarian couple did a tap dance.
All of them seemed to be having a good time.
After a couple more drinks I started getting heady and decided to stop the beer and wine guzzling.
Still I was reasonably sober until I reached my boarding.
I pondered over the more subtle nuances of life that did not make much sense to me the next day, before I passed out drunk.

The umlaut and the omelette

Eating out can burn a hole in your pocket in expensive Germany.
Not having attempted a crash course in cooking I expected major problems with the grub. But it turned out well after all.
I had come prepared on this trip with my supply of masalas (the entire works - including the sambhar and garam masala types) and two packs of tea bags which I had calculated would safely see me through three months; as I had been advised to do so by a contact who has earlier been to Germany. Good thing too - German fast food would have proved too bland for my taste and Indian tea is not too readily available, the locals preferring to go for Ceylon tea which tastes differently.
I made my diurnal visits to the supermarket a fine act of balancing my expenses so that it never went beyond ten euros. Everything at the supermarket was packaged and labelled in German, excluding the vegetable and meat sections. The first few visits to the supermarket were elaborate missions of exploration as I discovered where I could find what; burdened, as I was with the double disability of not being able to read labels in German on the produce and the inability to seek assistance in English.
Before I headed out each day, rucksack on back, I mentally prepared a shopping list that had the advantage of making the shopping easier.
Once at the supermarket I shopped like a programmed microchip. First to the vegetables section, usually for cabbage, cauliflower or potatoes (I avoided the more exotic vegetables that I was unfamiliar with - there was a lot of green stuff around of which I could only make out the spinach and lettuce) and the onions - which we Indians can't do without. Stocks of Sunflower oil once bought lasted nearly a month. (I preferred frying the vegetables in spicy powder; hell, anyway it tasted good !).
Next the rounds for bread, noodles or spaghetti, rice, followed by the usual milk cartons, packaged fruit juice (choosing between banana, grape, orange and maracuja fruit) and a choice between hundreds of varieties of yogurt; and finally some pork or chicken. And some butter occasionally, and mushrooms and ketchup for a change. Yes, they had the Indian variety of rice too. My daily trips always included several packages of what was labelled “Patna Reis”.
My cooking and eating too followed fixed patterns. It was yogurt in the morning before I left for work (that saved me time making tea), rice or spaghetti boiled in masala with meat in the afternoon and gulps of juice in the evening, as I cooked food for the next day, humming to myself as I watched my favorite TV channel that I presumed was the German avatar of MTV; followed by a hot supper of one of my edible concoctions.
I took the luxury of brunching a hot dog at the market place on Sundays.
Wine I never touched - and it must have seemed strange to the natives, me being in the land of the World's best wine.