When I touched down @ Deutschland (that's how complicated they make 'Germany' sound, back there), I did not have much to figure out. My cognitive sense had reset its expectation to encounter only german in all signboards and instead started looking for desi/paki cab drivers. Without much ado, I pulled into a car driven by a Schwabian (significance of this word, in the following paragraphs) driver and reached the hotel.
The lady at the reception (also the owner of this family owned hotel) was not of Paris Hilton lineage but good nevertheless. I did not have to use one of my lines to charm her. Her husband, a 7 ft old Schwabian and his dog appeared in quick succession without much smile on their face. I decided to wind up my attractiveness and behave like normal uncool Indian (read, amit sharma/venkat kommireddy/sukumar vallarasu/dilip jha).
While they did say that its a cozy family hotel, the details didn't elaborate much about the lack of shower gel tubes (which I generally take back home) or shampoos or hair dryer (apparently very important said a blonde colleague later). The awkwardly polygonal room looked more like a cellar than a room (with its post war airconditioning conveyors and all that). I could not really shower my angst with choicest of words like "mediocre", "claustrophobic" or "pathetic accouterments" as the only language they know is German and their English fluency stops where "Hi..How are you" stops. I had to still vent my disappointment with a curt "Room.Bad". It delivered a lot less punch than "High performance. Delivered" of Accenture. I later realized that the bewildered smile of the hotel owner had to do with the fact that 'Room.Bad' meant 'Room.Bath' in German and he had thought that I was asking for the bathroom which was indeed attached to the room. Oh, the un-intended third-worldly image I wore that moment!
Apparently in Schwbia (which is as German as it gets), they spend the saturdays buying grocery and the sundays at the church. Thats how cool the place is and anything that dint fit into this definition was given a miss (including serving food for the guests at the restaurant). Instead they served a rather big map in easily understandable german, printed in 8 font about how to navigate the city in the metro lines. After parasiting with a bad smelling german couple through the ticket booking & train ride episodes, I found salvation a.k.a country burger @ BurgerKing. Thus was made that day.
