German Tea party & Iqbal house

A German colleague of mine visited an exhibition in Japan and brought different teas with him. He is already very fond of teas. So he invited us to his house to try out different teas. We went there in the evening. He started with a Japanese green tea and then a Chinese green tea. Then some other green teas from Asia. Then he started the black teas. Presenting black teas from different countries, he ended up with Sri Lankan and Indian black teas. Many of my German colleagues were there. To my surprise, none of them put any sugar in any of their teas. Even they put milk only in the last two black teas. I had had it after drinking some teas without sugar, and then i started putting sugar in every tea. They did get surprised by this. :)

This weekend the International Club at the university arranged a trip to Heidelberg (Germany) to see the Christmas market. It is a tourist city located between mountains on two sides of the Rhine river. It has a castle which is pretty much preserved. We all went in the train there. Thank God that the snow had melted since Thursday and temperature was above zero. We first searched for a Pakistani restaurant and found three. Two were big but not so many guests in them. The third one was a small one with self service. It was crowded with Germans, a pleasant surprise for us. We even had to wait for a few minutes to get an empty table. The food was good and extremely cheap. May be thats why it was crowded.

Then we met a friend living there who took us to see Iqbal house. It is located on the river bank. There is a plaque on the boundry wall saying that Iqbal lived here and that he was the visionary of Pakistan. He lived here for about 6 months for German language course, before going to Munich for his Phd. Then we went on a small tram which climbs on a mountain at about 45 degrees angle. Half of the journey is done on a modern metallic tram, but the second half is completed on an old wooden tram pulled by a metallic rope. It went so high up the mountain that the ground was covered with snow there. It became extremely cold with chilling breeze blowing. After taking some pictures we resorted to coming back down to the city. We returned after it got dark. It gets dark these days around 4:35 pm.