India's prime minister in Germany

Today India's prime minister and Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel opened the world's biggest industrial exhibition, "Hannover Messe". The exhibition's partner country this year is India.

In their press conference Merkel mentioned a better collaboration between the two countries in matters of civil use of nuclear energy would be possible. Concerning the acceptance of India as a nuclear power she wants to await the result of the US-congress-poll.

Apparently India is beginning to gain more attention in Germany now. After the Hannover Messe it will also be partner country and main theme of the worlds biggest book fair, "Frankfurter Buchmesse", in autumn 2006.

But German economic professionals believe, that Germany recognized the importance and economical power of India too late and that a further collaboration between Germany and India will only be possible if Germany decides to support India's ambitions in nuclear power.

Source of picture: www.spiegel.de

Easter lily

Instead of Easter eggs I got some wonderful lilies from Ben. They were just too beautiful to not take a picture of them. This is the result. Thanks to Ben for letting me use his camera. :-)

Spring and the mowing mystery

What makes your day start better than waking up and notice the blue sky, the warm sun and that spring has finally arrived!

For the last 2 months the first thing I saw from my bedroom window every morning was usually a crowded street and some small front gardens with the last muddy remains of snow and some naked ugly trees. But not today!
This is what I saw this morning and which finally ended my yearning for spring:



Ahhhh, what a sight! Can't wait to dig out my skates to skate some laps on the Moselle promenade.

And as usual in Germany - suddenly you can see people mowing everywhere!
As soon as the first sunbeams touch your lawn it's your honour and duty to unpack your lawnmower and spin some circles to kill the first sprouting blades of grass!
Ridiculous!

Memories of Indian traffic

I found a nice video on YouTube today. Although showing only a very moderate version of the usual Indian traffic, it brought memories of the Chandigarhian traffic snarl back into my mind.

Oh yes, good times when 2 Indian guys with a 20m long wooden ladder crossed a roundabout during morning rush hour traffic, and 1 million scooters*, twice as much motorbikes* and (at least!) 5000 cars* PLUS 4 trainees from sector 8 Panchkula had to push their (in some cases not existent) brakes to the limit to avoid crashing into the ladder.

Discussing about the Indian traffic with German friends we found out that possibly the typical south-asian daily traffic looks more dangerous from the bird perspective, than from the trainee-on-cycle-perspective. Otherwise I'd really have no idea how we could survive 6 months cycling through the roundabouts of Chandigarh.

Check out the Indian traffic video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjrEQaG5jPM

*figures might reflect the authors subjective impression

Chocolitious Easter time

The German's chocolate addiction is nothing we can hide or deny - everybody knows about it.
So now Easter holidays have passed and it's time for a small statistic concerning chocolate consumption in the second most important chocolate time of the year.

Every German consumes about 1kg of chocolate during the Easter holidays. Per year it's about 8,5 kg, which is 3 kg more than the average European.

In contrast - the yearly per-head-consumption of chocolate in China is about 20 g! In fact chocolate was unknown in China until recent times. But their consumption is rising, which makes me worry about us having enough cocoa. If Chinese ate as much chocolate as Germans do, we might end up with chocolate being a luxury product.

This might not be too bad after all - considering the damage done to our body mass index during Easter! We have to stop harming ourselves! But honestly - who's able to resist a small fluffy pink Easter bunny with a chocolate marzipan egg in it's paw?? It's brutal!

That's why a guy from Berlin decided to sue easter bunny for grievous bodily harm.
The charge:
In fact Easter bunny tortures us by conviction, it's a sadistic little criminal that makes us become addict to calorie- and cholesterol-bombs masked as innocent little Easter eggs.

I'll do my best to prevent Easter bunny from becoming more powerful and eat only potatoe chips this week!

Blogdefloration

So here we are, yet another German pretending to be able to talk proper English, molesting the world with some (hopefully) funny stories from India, all day life impressions from Germany and other things mankind doesn't really need.

From time to time I might switch the blog standard language to German, so my parents can understand what I'm writing, but I guess it won't happen too often.

Due to occupied time capacities I had to stick to a standard template for now, but I already have another design on my mind which I'll implement as soon as I've finished my pre-diploma thesis.

Of course I'll be happy about every comment left in this blog. Feel free to criticize my poor English language skills (this one goes out to you Kent), make jokes about ridiculous German customs mentioned here, ask about what part of a pig is being used to make Schnitzel or anything else you want to expose to the precious readership of this blog including the author.