The story of my camera

For the frequent fliers, especially for the Europe bound fliers, Dubai airport has a great value as shopping center. But that proved completely wrong for me. I was to buy a battery for my antiquated analog PRIMA ZOOM85 camera. But to my great disappointment, the crew at the Dubai shopping mall informed me of that, for quite a while, all types of alkaline batteries have been banned in Dubai airport. And to my great frustration, I realized that I am to be without a camera during this once-in-a-lifetime experience with Nobel laureates at Lindau! With the rich in-flight entertainment (150 movies including few of the 2007 releases), the four hour journey from Dhaka starting at 10.30am on 27 January was not below my expectations. The shopping experience made me completely clueless. However this is not the first time I felt stupid during this trip.

After a three and half hour transit at Dubai we got into the plane. The ac in the plane was not working. So the plane delayed for one and half hour in Dubai. The temperature outside was around 35 degrees Celsius and we felt like burning onboard the aircraft. As the crew corrected the fault, the plane took off and we found that the in-flight entertainment in this plane is much worse than the earlier one. It had a only 5 movies to select from, the Dhaka-Dubai flight had 150!

After a tiresome fourteen hour journey we reached Munich at 10.50pm (Munich time). The scheduled arrival time was 8.55pm. So it was long one and half hour waiting at Munich airport for Sumit vi, whom I would like to introduce to you now. Sumit vi (full name Sumit Paul) is an electrical engineering graduate (class of 2005) from BUET and currently a PhD student at Germany. He has been here for last two years and has been the focal point for all the Bangladeshi students. Tacit and ever-smiling Sumit vi is. We got to his uncle’s place. After a good dinner we got to sleep at .

The next morning we visited a few places in Munich, Olympic stadium and the BMW showroom. Well I did not know, BMW originated in Munich (Bayern Munchen Wolkswagen). Afterwards we had a very good lunch at the Shurbahar, a Bangladeshi owned Indian hotel in Munich. It was fun indeed!

I would finish this blog with the final unfortunate twist in my luck. To my short-lived ecstasy, I found an electronics shop at the Munich train station, which sold batteries for my age-old camera. I immediately bought the battery along with two films. It cost 15 euro in total (104 times 15 = 1560 tk). I put the battery in the camera. And I realized it is actually my camera that is out of order. This time bad luck was financially frustrating too!

Lindau, Germany, 2 July