There is always someone

I've found that many a times life sends us exactly the people we need at the time - whether we're aware of it or not. Posting this now, because yesterday there was another such incident for me.

I recently decided to sign up for French lessons at a popular institute here. Yesterday was the first day of registrations for the new semester. I turned up at the institute at 8:40, anticipating some rush for the registration, maybe a 100-150 people, since I knew the low tuition fee made the course quite atractive. I walked in to find a queue that had already wound itself over two floors and two corridors before breaking up into a mob at the entrance of the hall where the registrations were happening. The institute had called in their biggest and most intimidating looking staff to hold back the crowd at the door. I raced to find the end of the line before I lost another dozen places. Maybe this is going to take 2-3 hours I underestimated as I joined the queue :)

Directly behind me I heard a couple speaking in English and occasionally in a language that sounded like Hindi, but was not quite Hindi. "Indians! or at least of Indian origin", I thought. In Luxembourg finding yourself right next to other Indians is quite something. The man left for work, and the woman and I started a conversation about the queue. Was the best thing that happened to me yesterday!

The wait in the queue turned into an unanticipated 8-hour marathon, the first 4 hours in the queue patiently crawling along to reach the doors, and the next 4 as part of the mob at the doors, where it was definitely each man for himself. Things heated up when the staff shut the doors for some reason and the space we were in got quite claustrophobic. By then most of the people there had been on their feet for about 5-6 hours, were hungry and thirsty and tempers were really starting to flare. Someone started yelling at the staff for not organizing things better, and a section of the crowd started chanting "Let us in" :) Every time the door opened even a crack, we would be packed in tighter by the crowd pushing in from behind. Some policemen came in, for crowd control in case things got ugly, I suppose. And someone with a very professional looking camera came up to the front and started clicking away. Maybe we'll all be in the local news in a day or two :)

If it hadn't been for my new found Parsi friend, the registration would have a horrendous experience. I get panicky when pressed in by crowds and probably would have given up and gone home hungry and tired as many people did after a while. If her husband hadn't come in at lunch time and stood in the queue in our places for a while, I wouldn't have had the respite of sitting down for a while and getting some food and drink. Incredibly when we came back, we found that he had even managed to move us up several places in the door mob. Quite a feat, considering the shoving and elbowing that was going on. And most of all if it hadn't been for our animated conversation about Luxembourg, the crazy rush for registrations, life, the universe and everything, I would have felt every minute of the 8 hours of standing in the queue.

And yes, we finally got ourselves registered at 5:30!

P.S. The award for the most cool headed people in the crowd goes to the group of Chinese students next to us who kept their smiles throughout the whole thing, didn't shove a single person, and even managed to teach some Chinese to the Cambodian girl with them :)