travelling is learning

4 countries in 3 weekends! Working in the weekdays and travelling during the weekends is what I have been doing since the time I came here. I realize the difference between my last Europe stint and my current one. Last time I was sceptical, laid back and unsure about many things. There was something that was holding me back, something like a thorn that doesn't bleed or stop you from walking but sort of makes its presence conspicuous by a constant pain.

Travelling is fun, travelling is learning and travelling is the best time to discover oneself. So I think I'd share every country's experience on these three points.

Luxembourg- Its a really small country in the vicinity of Belgium and I had heard that it seems like a scene from Eragon era minus the dragon.

• Fun- I was on a very tight schedule of trains and buses. The trains and buses in Europe run on time!!! It was difficult to digest initially but then I got used to it and now have started loving it, kind of what happened with me in case of washing and wiping ;)
• Learning- Always prepare your JIC 'just in case' plans. I looked out on the internet about the weather forecast but i still kept an extra sweater, you know just in case. As it later happened that i underestimated the temperature, the temperature is not all that different from India, but it is the winds that kills you.
• Discovery- People might not know you but they would go to great lengths in finding you the correct places like running with you for a good 200 meters to catch the last bus leaving in 3 minutes.

Germany- How I wanted to go to Luxembourg and ended up in Germany is yet another long story, so may be I'll tell it some other time. But I did go on to spend the weekend in the country side Germany. I remember when I was on the bus and I asked the driver which country are we in? Oh the look on his face was one I'll remember for a looong time. I really had to tell him that I knew where i was heading to. It can happen only in Europe that in a span of 2 hours you can cross a country by road!

• Fun- My host family were kind enough to host a pot luck and naming it Parth's Pot Luck. It was later did I realize that I would be cooking chapati and Indian curry with 10 people watching me and asking questions! The best part, me and the other 10 people tasted something like that for the first time. I had cooked it for the first time. It was good and I gloated for the rest of the evening because one of them asked me whether I cook for a living. No, I cook just to live. With people from 5 nationalities viz Philippines, Germany, United States, India and Russia, it was one of the most multicultural dinners I have ever had. It so happened that one of the guest couple in the pot luck worked in the local club, and then it dawned on me, why they said see you really soon while biding good bye. Now I understand why pot luck is called as pot luck. 
  Not to forget about my first snow fall. Trust me the first snow fall is always special. You will but not be doing justice if you try to imagine it, it has to be felt- the little flakes of ice, touching your skin and then melting in a blink of an eye, the landscape and it is so damn easy to have a drink on the rocks :D
• Learning- I learnt that cooking is not just for survival but you can make great friends and also represent your culture, your beliefs, your ethics and of course the girls really dig it. Sometimes you just have to take that plunge without knowing what is going to happen whether you are going to make a dish out of it or you'll have to forcibly dish it out.You need to believe in yourself first before you went on to believing others.
  
  
  I was invited by my host for a walk in the woods. I had always romanticized about going for a long walk with my grandfather in a forest listening all the while to his stories, gaining in the meanwhile a plethora of wisdom and knowledge. Wisdom about life and people and knowledge about how it used to be in his time. Combine this with a scenic beauty that looks as if Robert Frost's, John Keats' and Emily Dickinson's poems just got life and you can imagine what an experience I had.

 That afternoon, those 3 hours went by in a jiffy. There was a man of wisdom, of age and experience, telling about what trees are used for what, how to make a cut in life and how sometimes life cuts you. There was a boy young, carefree, absorbing and observant, one from the new generation- the generation that is ready to travel around the world, learn new things, cultures and traditions but never been lured to leave his own country for ever. He was telling and he was listening, they both switched places at times. He was wondering how he wanted to be at 70 years and he was smiling at how he used to be at 23. He told him his problems and he told his. He solved his problems with experience and he tried to solve his with mathematics. His face was lined and wrinkled, his face was smooth and young. He stooped a bit with age but was proud, he was upright but not yet proud. But what was common in both was that glint in the eye, his eyes sparkled with thinking of his past and his eyes sparkled imagining about his future.

The sky was a perfect white, you can see how the picture seems to have blended with the background of this post. For the first time I saw the grass being greener on my side. I found a really easy way to meditate, to empty my mind, to STOP THINKING. Just listen to all sorts of sounds that go around you, in my case the gurgling river, the chirping birds, the whistling breeze, the whispering leaves and the creaking trees.

So I learnt from him that life is not meant to be going how we want it to go, rather we are meant to be maximizing what we get however it goes. The country side, the pot luck, the crazy party and the walk in the woods, every single moment of my trip was an experience learning or otherwise but worth remembering for sure.

• Discovery- Its really not that bad trusting people. As the sayings go-

"Good people give you memories and Bad people give you experiences, a wise man should have both."

"There are no strangers in this world, just friends who you haven't met yet."