Towards the end of March, German artist Laura Klat had been in Bengaluru for around four weeks when she realized that she didn’t really know the city that had been her home for the past month. So she set out on her cycle, with a batch of freshly-made German potato salad, on streets of Bengaluru to get to know the city better.

Laura, who is in India as part of the residency programme organized by the Goethe Institut for German artists, toured around on the streets of Ulsoor, Bazaar market and Church Street, meeting people and making friends on the way. Her tour took place over the course of three days in the last week of March.

She sold her potato salad in a unique way- people could buy her salad in exchange for anything. “People gave me a lot of things; the women in the market gave me vegetables. It was quite funny,” she laughs, as she tells The News Minute about her potato-salad-cycle-tour.

Though Laura doesn’t speak the local languages, she says, that did not pose any major problems for her. “It was more in the context of doing something, rather than the language,” she states.

“However, I did have this one guy from work who speaks Hindi, so he came along and if there were questions, he would answer them when I couldn’t.  He didn’t stand next to me the whole time, so people didn’t really know he was with me. Whenever he felt I was facing difficulty in communicating, he would come and help. Other people who understood also helped when they could,” she explains.

This however, did not mean that conversations ran dry once they understood her concept. She had some long-drawn interesting conversations with the locals as she sold her salad.

What does she like best about Bengaluru? “The people, most definitely. The people here are so warm and friendly,” she exclaims.

As her visit to India draws to a close in two more weeks, she plans to put up a pop-up restaurant for a day, sometime next week. “I’ll be leaving for Berlin in two more weeks, but I’m sure I will come back”, she says, signing off.