Day 10 – What is heaven?

What is heaven? It’s here, the walls starting with the Islamic quotes of welcoming, the pillars and the incredible gardens, all sum up the beautiful Taj Mahal as heaven. Love shows extremely, because its love which resulted to this beautiful place.

Three promises to Mumtaaz by Shahjahan, all fulfilled. If the past of india was sad, it had a beautiful part to itself too, and Taj mahal is the best example to what India’s True beauty is. Haminastu fertoz, the Islamic phrase, meaning Heaven is Here, and we saw what heaven might look like. Trip to Taj Mahal definitely makes us fall in love with India over and over again.

Aditi

Day 7 – See you on the streets of India

In our first week of the German-Indian exchange project we have already seen some businesses of different sizes. We visited a local company which employs handicapped people and Krones, a “Mittelstand“ machine manufacturer. But today, on June 8th, our group of 10 students and 1 teacher from Lotus Valley International School went to see the Bavarian Motor Werke, better known as BMW. Their biggest manufacturing plant in Europe is located in Dingolfing and it took us approximately 1 hr by bus to reach it from school. All of my friends and I were very excited to see it. Since years we are talking about German cars and we were eager to see how they were built.

BMW Dingolfing
Our Indian group in front of BMW Dingolfing

As we arrived at Dingolfing (exact position: plant 2.4; gate 3) we were greeted by our very friendly and energetic guide for the trip, Ms Steffani, who took us to a conference room immediately. There we saw an introductory video about the entire plant. During this video the history of BMW, the structure of the company and their philosophy was explained, too.
After this informative movie Ms Steffani guided us to the assembly part, which is the last step in manufacturing a brand new BMW. All the parts including the engine, the tyres, the doors of the car are assembled there. By the way, did you know that they call the assembling of chassis and the tyres is called “the wedding”?

At this part of the manufacturing process were many engineers and other workers which added different compartment to the cars “just in time”. But the most interesting was to see the robots working! The robots were also engineered and designed by a German company called Kuka. Without making any mistakes they glued parts together, mended metal components or moved different pieces from one place to another.

As we went on with our tour through the BMW plant we could also see how different parts of the car are pressed into their desired shapes and sizes. Even this work was totally done by machines. Only sometimes workers checked the presses and changed the adjustments when necessary.

And then at last, we went to the paint shop, where again robots painted the car according to the customer’s choice. The actual painting process was a long and – because of the foggy paint – a breath taking process, but the robots managed it without complaining or hesitating! Finally the car was finished and was carefully cleaned with ostrich feathers.

It was amazing to see the work done to perfection. Every minute the workers of BMW paid attention to every single detail to create a perfect car.

Who knows? Perhaps we will see one of the cars which were built today soon. I am looking forward the next time I am seeing a BMW on the streets of India.

“Written” by Khwahish

Day 6 – A trip to the north of Bavaria

#7th June 2018, wonʼt come again, and one more day passes of the german exchange

Today, we the Indians had gone to a very historical and a beautiful city, Nürnberg! Mr. Wolfgang was our guide, and he explained everything so well

And also was very sweet to us!! We were also given some shopping time, the local shops were to see. But definitely we missed our partners a lot ?. We just wish that they could also have come with us on all such short tours, it would have been more fun!
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But still it was a day well spent.

May Lord Ganesha bless your journey

For our Indian friends the journey is going to begin. The suitcases are packed, all the relatives got their hugs and the best wishes of all family members accompany our students and their teacher.

This weekend 17 students and 2 teachers of Lotus Valley International School are bording on a direct Lufthansa flight from Delhi to Munich and will start a great adventure. They are traveling to Germany to take part in the German-Indian exchange project “Different countries – different sports“.  So I ask Lord Ganesha to bless this journey.

But why Ganesha? Only few Germans know about Hinduism and even fewer can distinguish the different gods and deities that occure in that religion.

Ganesha - Der Beseitiger der Hindernisse
Ganesha – गणेश – Vinayaka – Vigneshvara – only view of his many names.

However Ganesha is easy to identify being always represented with an elephant head and often in company with a mouse or rat. The serpent is a common attribut of Ganesha, too. The snake is wrapped around his neck or his big stomach. The stories about the “birth” of Ganesha is well known and there are lot of other myths about his life.

Among others Ganesha is considered to be the Lord of letters and learning and you can pray to the deva to get knowledge and wisdom.

But Lord Ganesha is also the Lord of obstacles. He places them and removes them from the path.

And to tell the truth – obstacles are the last thing our small group of students need on their trip to Germany. So let’s pray to Ganesh, that the journey shall happen without obstacles.

And if there is some extra knowledge for our students included, nobody won’t complain 😉