Saturday, April 18, 2020

The comedy of errors


With so many days we have spent on the same topic, quarantine and corona, I thought of making a memory book and write all tidbits that have made me laugh hard.
So this was my first travel out of India. I traveled to Germany, Waldorf, SAP Headquarters, the year 2007 or 2008. I lived in a guest house and had some Indian colleagues who eventually became friends.

I invited a friend to have lunch on a Saturday afternoon. He visited while I was cooking my Daal (Curry) - Rice (that was the only thing I knew how to cook that time). But it's not about my culinary skills, it is about what I did with them😊

I had a studio on the top floor and the door of the Balcon had a Big Red lock. It looked like a mysterious lock with some codes. So, Sherlock Holmes inside my friend suddenly woke up.
He looked around and asked, "what's there at the door ". I had just put my rice in the Indian cooker that whistles. I hardly cared about his question and replied " No clue". He asked, "you never tried to open it ". I said, "No, but you can try ".
So the man got a job to show his skills😊

He tried turning one or two rivets and just when he succeeded to open the lock, the alarm rang.
                                           It was a burglar alarm. :P

It was super loud and we had heard that if there is such an alarm in Germany the police will run to your door. We ran to close it, but we did not know-how. So we ran out in our pajamas to call the guesthouse owner. Hastily, my friend closed my room because the alarm was too loud. We realized a minute after that the door is automatically locked from inside now and we can't enter the studio anymore.

I had an old  Nokia phone in my hand and I called the owner of the guest house. She was a 70 years old lady who did not know English and we did not know german.
I don't know what we explained, but she came in  20 minutes.  When she entered rice was boiled and there was water on the floor and my cooker started whistling. Not just that the smoke alarm also started working.

She looked furious, and both of us looked like two puppies who did not know what happened.
She first plugged off all the alarms, I closed the gas and then she looked at me.
I shouted at me in german for five minutes, of which I could not understand a single word. But she was saying something about the adventures I just did and the state of the kitchen.
After she looked at my friend, not sure what happened, but she charged to his room.
The boys had made a party last night in his room and you can imagine the state of the room, it was full of beer bottles. She started rambling him too, to which he put his down and quietly listened.

She gave 10 minutes lesson in German and then walked out. We looked at each other and couldn't stop laughing. We laughed hard for the whole week in fact,  and we laughed about that incident every time I ever cooked at the house party. 😊    

Here are some photos of that year :