Our Berlin tour guide’s arrival at our hotel in a taxi, a grand Mercedes Benz Van, was conveyed to me from the front desk through intercom promptly. We descended from our fourth-floor room and there he was. Tall, grinning from molar to molar. While shaking hands, we said, “Sorry, we are late” only to be told with another grin, “Oh, never mind. You are from India.” Probably he was giving expression to his experience with Indians as a tourist guide. It is my experience that every tourist guide, from Rajasthan to every foreign country I visited, is a chatter-box, voluble, fluent, hence irritating words come from his or her lips in fusillades. You begin to avoid listening preferring to look around, observe and admire. This one is no different.
