Michael Marzahn • Searching for Breakfast
The next question I often hear from other people is what I’m
searching for when I’m travelling to India or when I am travelling in general.
I’m always curious and open-minded and so I’m searching for many things.
It doesn’t always have to be the main attractions of a country that I visit. I’m
also searching for the small things that can be found in the accommodating
gestures of local people, studying locals in their daily life, taking the local
transportation, eating local food, enjoying sunrises or sunsets or just by having
funny experiences when people are confronted by my height (2 meters) or
when they ask curious questions about German history.
I was in Kerala, India, for the wedding I mentioned before and I had to take
the last ferry back to the mainland in the middle of the night. There were only
three other locals on the boat with me. They came up to me and one of them
asked me where I was from. I told him, Germany. You could see him looking
me up and down, thinking about something for a split second. And then he
suddenly asks: What was Hitler’s height? I was completely surprised to hear
a question like this out on a boat in the middle of nowhere in the middle of
the night and so I just said: I don’t know exactly but I think he was not so tall
and sometimes the smaller guys can be the more dangerous ones. That made
us all laugh out loud.
And it’s exactly situations like this that symbolize for me what “breakfast”
is – the small wonders we hope to find on each and every single one of our
journeys. In the end, we are all searching for – breakfast!
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March 2015