Deepavali 2009

Well deepvali 2009 will be a very special one for a few of us. A few of us from IMEC planned to spend the deepaveli weekend at Triberg. It is a place is the black forest region of Germany. The trip started of a grand not. On Friday we went to pick up the rented car. We haev booked for BMW 3 series or a Merc C Class. We landed at the rental place and it so happened that they had run out of both the cars. So we got an upgrade to a Volvo XC 70. We all set of from IMEC at 530. But by the time we left Leuven it was 630 pm. We had told the hostel ppl at Triberg that we would enter the place by 11:30 pm max. But since we left 1 hour later than the scheduled time, we all got to Triberg only at 00:30. And the hostel was closed. We tried looking for places around, but for some strange reason there was not a single free room in all of Triberg. (FYI Triberg is one of the popular tourist places in the black forest region). So not finding a room was very surprising. The temperature had started to drop in the region. We all decided to put on the winter gear we had taken and go to sleep in the after parking in the parking lot of the hostel. Since we were 5 young men, we decided to keep the windows open, so we dont dies from lack of oxygen. It started to get seriously cold at about 4. All of us could barely sleep, due to the cold and lack of any kind of space to stretch. The next day morning we requested the hostel ppl to let us freshen up. He said we could brush our teeth and answer our morning calls but nothing more. There is a popular saying in tamil which is "Deepavali deepvali-ku dhan kulipeya" meaning "do u take a shower only once every deepvali. In my case, it was one of the few days where i could not take a shower. The deepavali of 2009, will be a special one for hte guys i went on the trip with. More detail of the trip and photo will follow shortly. But in the mean time photo of the car we traveled in.