Waiters Are Changed Into Robot in Germany

Germany has given the world many great inventions: the aspirin, the airship, the diesel engine. But surely it’s never produced anything as weird as this. From Nuremberg comes the automated eatery.

The restaurant I’m in has no waiters serving the tables. Instead there are metal tracks crisscrossing the cafe, like a giant helter skelter and using gravity to bring food direct from the kitchen in the roof to your table. I can see bottles of wine whizzing down from above, supersonic sausages speeding along, too. This is ‘fast food’ - German style.

There, that’s the sound of a pork schnitzel arriving at our table. The ordering process is fully automated, too. There are no waiters hanging around with paper and pencil. You use computer touch screens to browse the menu and select the dishes.

But what’s the point? Well, the German inventor who came up with the concept says cutting out the waiters makes the restaurant more efficient. Thinking about it, I suppose it works out cheaper for the customers, too. After all, in this restaurant, there’s no one to tip!

The First Special Hotel For Women In Middle East

The executive director of the Luthan Hotel and Spa says the response to the idea of a women-only hotel has been overwhelming.

The hotel has twenty-five rooms and offers round the clock services to guests. There’s a pool and spa, with yoga and fitness classes, which the hotel hopes will attract women on business trips and well as expatriates from the nearby diplomatic quarter and local women coming for fun.

This is the first spa hotel available to women all the time, pools in other hotels are only open to women on certain fixed days or hours. And in a country where women are required by law to cover themselves in Islamic dress when in public it’s a huge bonus that inside the hotel they can move around uncovered as if they were at home. As the manager put it, it’s like being anywhere else in the world.

Saudi tourism officials who attended the launch of the hotel have encouraged other women to invest in similar hotels across the Kingdom. Women-only hotels already exist in America, Berlin and the former Yugoslavia. And Britain. for example. has a hotel offering a floor exclusively for women while Tehran and Bombay have women only taxi services.