Grüezi–Europe that I saw (1)

My beloved friend Mathew M Baby, fondly known as Mathai has since visited more than 40 countries so far. By the time I finish this essay, he must have landed in new country.

Paying rich tributes to this globe trotter let me start a new sequel to the tales of my latest expeditions. Remember, Mathai has not yet started writing travelogues –fortunately or unfortunately. If he decides to do so in future, I will certainly lose my job. Those desert living sequels and stories from China will just look silly in front of what Mathai is going to narrate. Fortunately, he is an extremely busy man who finds no time even to take a good breath. He sells software to airline companies all over the world. Good luck to my friend. Carry on with your present job; don’t think of encroaching to my field.

My senior colleague in my present company used to repeat one incident he came across when he visited Switzerland last year. He had been driven by his host from the work place to his hotel room. On the way, during the conversation, he asked his host, what will be the punishment in case of traffic violation. The surprised host just replied he did not know. He asked back a question to my colleague: “why should I violate the rules?”

I too do not know what punishment I may get if I violate traffic rules in my country. I wonder sometimes if any such thing exists there! Only one thing I know, in case of traffic violation and a policeman happened to be there in the vicinity, I have to pay a maximum of fifty rupees to him as a gift and then continue breaking the rules with élan.

Now, looking from the window of my room in Zurich city, I can see a busy road down there and the vehicles moving very systematically. Red means stop, amber means deceleration and green means go! Pedestrians wait patiently at the zebra crossings for the green signal. Everything has a rhythm. Like a well programmed system, men and machine move along. At the zebra crossings where no signals are available, every vehicle stops till the pedestrians cross the road. Motorists wait patiently at the zebra crossings till the lat person crosses the road. Pedestrians do not even look to the sides while they cross the road at the zebra crossings. I feel, we must change the colour of zebra crossings in our country to yellow like here. Probably this will prompt motorists to respect the pedestrians to some extent!

Zurich is a very expensive city. For a 7 km drive from airport to my hotel, the taxi cost was 34CHF (Swiss francs), that is approximately equal to rupees 1500. When we start converting these foreign monies to Indian rupees, we really feel the big difference. Hotel rooms are costly as well. Ok, anyway my company is sponsoring everything, so I need not worry about it. I have to worry about food. I still could not come to know what these people eat! As a vegetarian, I find it very difficult to have something worth eating. So far, I have surviving with some salads, pastas and bread, fruits and of course with some eatables I brought from Chennai. There are some Indian restaurants too, but I am yet to visit them.

The most attractive thing in the city of Zurich is its public transport system. Buses, trams and trains run very frequently. Trams queue up on the roads. Unlike our Kokatta trams, these trams are clean and well used by the public. All the three means of transportation are functioning efficiently. It is very easy to use them and we can reach any destination so easily. Today I travelled from Birr, the village on the outskirts of Zurich by changing three trains. I need not even ask anybody for direction even once to reach my destination. Everything is well defined and people us it with responsibility. Tickets are taken through automatic vending machines. These tickets are valid for busses, trains and trams. This makes public transportation in the city so simple

Thanks to a simple and efficient public transport system, people sparingly use their own vehicles. This reduces the traffic congestion on the road to a very great extent. Unlike in Dubai and Sharjah, we can not find long queues of cars on the Zurich roads. There can be one more reason for the people to depend on the public transport. 1 litre benzene costs 1.65CHF and Diesel costs 1.75CHF. Perhaps this acts as a deterrent. Even in a rich country like Switzerland, people do not mind using busses and trains for commutation. They do not nurture false pride like owning a car is the symbol of richness and riding a bicycle diminishes the stature. There are so many cyclists on the road and there are specific lanes on the road for cyclists.

We can hardly find any high rise buildings in the city. All buildings so far I saw may have a maximum of 30 or 4 meter height. The city has no penchant for sky scrapers like Dubai. On every street we can find buildings built at almost same height. The greenery is lost for the time being as the trees have already shed their leaves in the winter. Walking on the streets of Zurich brought me back the memories of my China visit 3 years back. Cities like Beijing and Tianjin were so meticulously decked up by the government there so that their cities look just like a European city. So, when I walked on the Zurich city streets, I could not find anything new here. The same trouser and coat wearing men and the girls in tights, miniskirts and high heeled shoes. They looked exactly similar. I am not sure if I could use the term déjà-vu here.

Desert Living–17 - Dubai airport

Dubai airport is supposedly one of the biggest in the world. This airport is acting as a connecting point to several parts of the world. Many flights across the globe have stopover in Dubai. This sprawling airport accommodates so many duty free shops. Prices in the shops do not look to be significantly higher than that in the outside market. If the purse is big or you have a credit card, take a walk around the airport. You will be tempted to buy.

As we walk along, doing window shopping, we can spot many people sleeping on the floor just below the chairs kept for passengers in waiting. It gives an impression that we are somewhere at a bus stand or a railway station in our country. If you happen to be in Pondicherry bus station, at any given time, you could spot two or three men lying on the platform, smeared with vomit. No one cares for this, because, drinking is the state sponsored occupation for many in this part of the world.

It is not factually correct to state that we could hardly spot Arabs in public places. We can see so many of them in “Bars”. In the bars, more than eighty per cent of the tables are occupied by the Locals. Sipping the nectar, they while away their time lazily there. In the other room next to this, skimpily dressed Indian beauties were dancing their heart out to earn a fortune. Outside both the rooms, at the door, men dressed up in ‘royal suits’ salute every visitor expecting some tips from the users of the bar, to make both the ends meet. Life has extremes like this. Dear friends, relax. Be unfazed by all that is happening around us. Don’t get so perturbed if you feel that nothing much could be achieved in life so far. If possible, try to snatch a chair from the Arab in the nearby bar and gulp a glass of Chivas Regal added with a few cubes of ice. Let the spirit sour high. Without spirit nothing can be achieved, after all….

Locals are also found is shopping malls. There are so many shopping malls in the city built in multi stories and lakhs of square feet in area. Carrefour has a number of malls here. We can spot a Carrefour in the city just as we can spot a KFC and a Mc Donald in a China city. There are flyovers constructed exclusively to reach shopping complexes. Dubai Mall must be the biggest among all. In the Dubai Mall the biggest attraction is the aquarium.

Dubai Aquarium, one of the largest tanks in the world at 51m x 20m x 11m and featuring the world’s largest viewing panel at 32.8m wide and 8.3m high. Dubai Aquarium has more than 33,000 living animals, representing more than 85 species including over 400 sharks and rays combined.

Dubai Aquarium's 270-degree acrylic walkthrough tunnel makes for incredible close-encounter experiences with some of the most fascinating underwater animals on the planet. A special 'lunar-cyclic' lighting system will change the ambience of the tank depending on the time of day. (courtesy -http://www.thedubaimall.com/en/entertainment/entertainment-section/dubai-aquarium-underwater-zoo.html)

There is facility to swim inside this aquarium wearing diving suit. In the glass container, there were a number of varieties of fish, big and small, swimming around. Each type of them flock together and ‘go places’ as a gang. The groupism in the glass container just reminded me of behaviour of we human beings. If we are in a group of people from all over the world, we tend to segregate according to the countries we come from. If we are in India, we segregate according to our states or language and in the company of people from the same state, we segregate as per our religions. If we are in the company of the people from same religion, we segregate as per caste and the division continues. The only difference between the creatures in that container and the humans is that, they do not fight with each other.

My return this time was by Jet airways. The beautiful girls on board the aircraft gave a distasteful experience this time. They called everyone ‘sir’, including me. The not so sincere call gave be some kind of itching sensation all over the body. The tone of that call was definitely not befitting a service driven industry like aviation.

The aircraft was only partly occupied. Hardly after one passenger occupied his seat, one of the air hostesses approached him and requested him to shift his seat to another vacant one. He did not like it first, but obliged to her repeated requests. After a while, a little boy approached one of the girls to help him answer nature’s call. She had virtually shooed him away to his seat. As the flight took off, I demanded a feedback form from one of the crew members. She suddenly wanted to know from me if I was satisfied with the service rendered by her. She even dared to say if I had any complaint to lodge through the feedback form, she will not give the form. I do not know if she really meant to say this. Crew members of some airline services are no longer justifying the popular belief that they shower tons of smiles on the passengers and suffocate them with care and attention.

As I landed at Anna International Air Port, Chennai, another episode of desert living has come to an end. A delighted heart got back into the usual business in the chaotic ambience of its motherland…