Badri held his mums hand tightly as the plane banked into Frankfurt airport. He was going to spend a two week holiday with his Dad who worked as an engineer in Germany. “ I’ll carry the back pack,” he told his mum helpfully, as he stood in line waiting for the doors of the plane to open. They still had a train to catch and another two hours of travel before they reached Wurzberg, where his Dad would collect them and take them to Schweinfurt.
Frankfurt was a big, bustling airport with hundreds of passengers checking the sign boards for the ‘gates’ they had to catch their planes from, or hurrying to get a taxi and go out into the city.

Badri and his Mum walked into the main airport lobby and like most European countries, they took the escalator down to the train station. “Lets get a sandwich and some hot chocolate before we go down to the station,” said his Mum, “we still have an hour before our train to Wurzberg arrives,” she said, glancing up at the big sign boards announcing the train timings.

Sitting on the tall bar stool at the counter, Badri’s little legs dangled and swung as he sipped his hot chocolate and ate his Tuna sandwich. “Gosh, Germany is such a clean place,” he thought, as he looked around at the gleaming airport and the organised way in which travellers moved around.

Only the airport security check scared him, as the security guards checked through everything in his back pack and threw away the little cup of yoghurt he had saved for when he was hungry.

“No liquids and sharp instruments young man,” tut-tutted the guard and he was secretly glad he put his pen knife away in his Mums big suitcase, which was checked in.

The only brown face at the Wurzberg station was Dad and he greeted them with a huge hug. “Wow Dad!,” shouted Badri, “you have an Audi, that’s really cool!”  “Yes son! The company I work for in Schweinfurt, has given it to me to use for my tenure here,” he said. “ It’s a German car and as you can see is very reliable like the Germans are,” said Dad.

Picture postcard town
“Every home has a window box full of scarlet geraniums, look Badri,” said his Mum. “ The whole city is like a picture postcard, with perfect little gardens and lovely homes.” The streets of the town were named after famous German classical music composers— Bach, Brahms, Mendelssohn Schumann and their house was on Mozart ‘Strasse’, which means ‘street’ in German.

Black birds sang in the branches of the apple trees in the morning and Badri’s mum was thrilled to hear a lark twittering in the wheat fields behind the house. Schweinfurt was a little village town in the Bavarian part of Germany and so Badri and his Mum decided they would take home a real German cuckoo clock to India as a souvenir.

Self-service
When Dad was busy at work, Badri would help his mum clean up the house. There were no servants in Germany and everyone did all their own work. For the first time in his life, Badri learnt to scrub the toilet and the bath tub after he used it. After he ate his breakfast he had to stack his own plate, cup and saucer into the dish washer.
Once the dishwasher was full, it was switched on and in one wash all the dirty dishes were washed and dried. “Saves a lot of water this way son,” said Dad. “At home in Bangalore, Pushpa uses so much water to wash our dirty dishes by hand.”

As they walked about Schweinfurt, window shopping and enjoying the fresh air in the market place down town, Badri noticed several colourful, painted life-size ‘pigs’ in front of various shops. There were two fashionable pigs in front of Galleria Kaufhof— a huge shopping mall with everything one could ever want. Badri whipped out the little digital camera his Dad had given him to use and shot pictures of the interesting ‘pigs’.

In front of the Volkswagen showroom there was a pig in overalls. Near an apothecary or chemist there was another pig. At a travel agency there was a pig with a map of the world. “Shops and restaurants joined in sponsoring a ‘pig’ which was made of fibre glass and decorated to represent their business.

Fashionable hogs!
“Schweinfurt literally means ‘pig ford’ and so we decided to laugh at ourselves with this ‘pig art’ movement!,” explained Badri’s Dad’s boss— a big smiling German named Hubert Reuss. “You can get yourself a small one from the shops and paint whatever you like all over it and take it home to India.” For the two weeks he was in Schweinfurt, Badri enjoyed eating juicy, white, steamed Asparagus and Bratwurst— which is a German sausage in a bun.

“The Germans are wonderful confectioners and so everyday you can choose a different slice of cake from the village confectionery,” offered Badri’s Dad. At the end of two weeks they tasted everything from a fresh Rhubarb Crumble to a Blueberry Torte.

As Badri and his Mum flew home to Bangalore he thought to himself, “Someday when I am grown up, I must come back here to work like Dad.”

For the present he was happy he had a beautiful cuckoo clock packed carefully into his back pack, to take back to India and show off to his Nannama and Tathiya.