Berlin

Last weekend I met Cassie in Berlin. Oh Berlin... how to describe.

I got there using this carpooling website to meet people already going to these cities and then you just split gas with them essentially and it works out great usually. The guy that drove on my way to Berlin FLEW on the Autobahn. I was actually pretty sure that if the car was any more aerodynamic or god forbid had wings we would have been having lift problems. I was remarkably calm though considering I had trouble trying to imagine friends of mine that I would even agree to be in a car with going nearly that fast.

Let me start by explaining that it was the hottest day I've had to experience in Germany so far... it was on the hot side even by Florida standards (90s Fahrenheit... I think... either that or I've become a wimp this Summer) and since Europe has virtually no air conditioning the only escape you can get from the heat is finding some shade with a breeze. So after Cassie and I met we tried to walk around and see some sights but it was about 1:00 in the afternoon so it was at its hottest so we decided to find a park and some shade and hang out for a bit hoping it would cool down soon. Neither of us having slept much the previous night, we ended up passing out for a few hours in the Tiergarten under a tree. When we woke up it was indeed a little bit cooler... but still pretty awfully hot as far as I was concerned.

We walked around the city trying to find sights to see and just sort of wander... we didn't realize it at the time but we walked through a good 80% of a tour we took later. The most noticeable thing about walking around the city, this is on a Saturday evening mind you, is how just terribly quiet it was. It didn't feel like the capital of a fairly big country with a supposedly famous reputation for getting crazy... it was just... quiet. We scavenged together a dinner from a grocery store (where after speaking to the cashier there in German her first real sentence in response to me was "you speak English?"), did a bit more walking, a bit of beer drinking, and called it a night.

We took a 'free' tour of the city the next day which ended up passing exactly through most of what we had seen the day before for the first part, just with a lot more information, and sort of placing the historical events I had known to occur in the city to specific spots. The actual chronology of our day at this point is partially a blur and mostly unimportant so I'm going to drop that construct.

Compared to Munich, Berlin certainly wins in just how neat their memorials and monuments are. They have a Holocaust Monument which is just absolutely amazing. They stuck it right smack in the middle of the city, I think with the intention to make it absolutely impossible to ignore. I have pictures of it so I'll refer you to those to see what it is exactly, but the beauty of it isn't in the actual structures erected so much as the experience of being there and walking through it. I don't think I can describe it correctly like this so maybe you'll have to ask me personally about it sometime, but I strongly recommend this to you if you're ever in the area. I was actually reluctant to mention it or post pictures of it because the difference between seeing the pictures or hearing about it is so vast compared to being there and walking through it that I felt I would be doing it a disservice.

And on the spot of where the first Nazi book burnings took place they have another really neat monument. It looks almost like a window sitting on the ground. If you look at it at an angle you see shelves... shelves that are said to contain an empty space for all of the irreplaceable books that were burnt that day. And then looking straight down at it all you see is your own reflection. This translation is repeated in the captions of my pictures but the marker for this monument has the extremely fitting quote by Heinrich Heine (written over a hundred years prior to this burning, and whose works were burnt) which translates as "That was only a prelude, for where one burns books, in the end one also burns people."

In the end I think if I had to pick one way to describe Berlin it would be as a "recovering Schizophrenic." Berlin was originally many small villages that were sort of mashed together to form one city, and then after WWII it was split up for some 50 years. It's only been one city again for 17 years, and only been the capital of unified Germany since 1996. In some ways I feel like it's somewhat skittish and still sort of in the middle of integrating the lifestyle of West Berlin and East Berlin to make a single identity, not to mention the huge presence that the Soviet Union and the Allies have left there... maybe not as far as military presence, but historical... and you can just kind of feel it there. After our two days there I felt as though I had seen nothing of the spirit of the city... I really felt as though I hadn't been in Berlin at all actually. By contrast I really felt like I had started to feel comfortable in London after a few hours, Edinburgh overnight, and after spending one day in Munich I felt closer to the city. Obviously a weekend isn't enough time to really see any city worth seeing... but Berlin especially so compared to everywhere I've been up to now. But it's changing so quickly these days that I would imagine someone that grew up there would have the same problem if they came back for a weekend.

This is already way more than I thought I was able to write about Berlin. Ian and Dave are coming to visit at the end of the week(!) and the entire time they're here I'm taking off from work so I think my next adventures will be all about that time.

Mit freundlichen Grüssen,
Shane

ein kleines Update

So I've added some more pictures to my Munich album. For the most part they are relatively random and there aren't many stories behind them but I'll try to highlight the additions.

 -one church here has a series of bones on display, i don't want to know whose or why... it's more fun that way
 -I had the opportunity to play chess on a nearly lifesize chess board
 -We witnessed a hunting protest involving marching and dancing boars, birds, cats, and foxes.
 -So many of the churches here have dragon slayers... I think that's a part of the Bible often forgotten in the US
 -Found a Quantum Physics book in the Gift Shop of the Deutsches Museum titled " Schrödinger's Cat." And yes, that does imply that the gift  shop for this museum contains Quantum Physics books ... in German... also Mathematics and Chemistry books... among others.

One really neat little highlight was spending a day in the Deutsches Museum with Robert. This is essentially a massive science Museum... massive. To give you an idea Robert and I spent nearly an entire day there, from 10:30 to 5:00(when it closed), and by the end of the day I think I had seen maybe one quarter of the exhibits they had... and those that I saw we ran through a little on the quick side since we skipped almost all the displays which were in German since for me to read just one display may take 10 minutes so it just wasn't worth it. They have scheduled "shows" every now and then including one that incorporated loud bangs from strong electrical discharges and a Faraday Cage! They had a room to demonstrate some of the interesting results from Newtonian Physics, an example of which is a video I took (several actually) of Robert or Myself holding onto dumbells and spinning on a platform with our arms outstretched... then when you pull your arms in due to the conservation of angular momentum you speed up... this is exactly what figure skaters do in just about every finishing of a routine, that super spin effect. I felt like a little boy running through a toy store throughout most of the day because every thing was interactive, there was always some button to push or magnet to play around with or chemical to mix... such a great place. I hope to go back soon but I have other priorities so we'll see. For a geek like me though, this place is heaven.

That's all for now. I've been busy lately so more to come shortly, just wanted to appease the fan(s).

Shane