My first day in Germany

When I alighted at Freiburg in the wee hours of the morning from the ICE train I had taken from Frankfurt Flughafen(Airport) the previous night, I expected to see a bustling railway hub full of people, considering the fact that Freiburg is one of the prominent towns in South Western Germany. Instead what I found was a neat, almost empty complex with a few people huddled around tables in a small tea and snacks outlet, in complete contrast to what you would expect at an Indian railway station.
I decided to have a cup of tea, since I had nothing to eat save for vitamin tonic from a dispensing machine at Frankfurt airport the previous night. It was Ceylon tea and I didn't take a particular liking to it, but which seemed to be a hit in Germany.
I killed time waiting for my German sponsor to pick me up, as he had promised, to take me to Endingen.
I walked out of the railway station onto the clean cobbled pathway outside and had my first glimpse of a German town. There were neatly arranged quaint buildings on either side of the smooth tarred road. The air was crisp and cool and clear too, inspite of a light mist.
I decided I badly needed a cigarette after all that hectic travelling. Luckily I still had some Camels left over from the pack I had bought at the airport. I had just lit one, when a very official looking police car drove up in front of the railway station.
Wary of the ban on public smoking in India, I expected trouble, but the uniformed men were not at all interested in my preoccupation.
When I had consumed most of the cigarette, I looked around to find somewhere where I could dispose it, aware of the fact that littering was a punishable offence in most Western countries. Not finding any proper place I gestured to a German gentleman walking past me. He pointed to one of the trash buckets fastened to a pole just a few yards away from me. I was puzzled. Throwing a lighted cigarette into a trash bin was new to me.
Then he pointed to the metal plate fused into the mouth of the garbage bin. With his hands spread wide he gestured saying "BOOOM!".
I understood. He wanted me to stub out the butt on the the metal plate before disposing it in the bin, which for in any case might be filled with a lot of inflammable material, maybe paper too. And he was implying that if I directly put the lighted butt into the bin, there was a risk of explosion.
Well, that interaction was going to be the beginning of many future brushes with other Germans, later, when I would be gesturing with my hands and trying to convey my thoughts that way and being answered with shaking of hands and legs and a onomatopoeic sound to follow it!