The Columnist Manifesto

Starbucks U.S. merchandizing scheme apparently translates pretty directly into the German marketplace. There are few immediately noticeable differences in the look of the place or the offerings, right down to the "Tall, Grande, Vente" sizes -- Starbucks' own international language of the $4 cup of coffee.

I couldn't bring myself to set foot in a McDonald's, but from quick outside pass-bys, it seems to be basically the same in Germany as in the U.S.

Dunkin Donuts is a different story, however. The many Dunkin's around Berlin offer a selection of donuts presumably adapted to German tastes. In contrast to the "shades of brown" expectations of U.S. consumers, German Dunkin goes tutti fruity, both in color and flavor, even as they deploy mostly English in the point-of-sale display.


Dunkin Donuts, Friedrichstrasse S-Bahnhof, Berlin.

Lemon, peach, cherry, cherry-banana, banana split, pink, orange, red. Who came up with these?

I refer of course to Saturday's tragically ironic story of the collision of two news choppers while filming a police car chase.

What's the lesson here? Please take the following internet poll with your interpretation:

1) The journalist always becomes the story.

2) What won't they do to generate a headline on a slow news day!

3) Bad karma catches up to "if it bleeds, it leads" journalism.

Now, a question for all you legal eagles:

Can the fleeing felon in the underlying car chase be charged with murder for the four journalist deaths under the "felony murder rule"?

Not to get all greeting-card on you or anything, but one of the great things about a long trip is returning to an emotional wave of how much you love where you live. (If you do. I do.)

Here I am, depicted iconically, at my favorite table at Grandma Moses. Note my one travel souvenir: an Ampelmann mousepad.

Lots of catch-up travelblogging still to come... stay tuned!

I love the word “Kino.” To me it suggests an engrossing foreign intrigue. It means “cinema,” not only here in Germany, but in other middle and eastern European countries – Poland, the Czech republic, and I don’t know where else. It’s an international word that’s not English.

I’m a firm believer in visiting the kino when traveling abroad. It’s interesting to see a familiar cultural experience twisted 60 degrees off kilter.

The differences can be a hoot. I particularly recommend seeing comedies, so you can hear what the native residents laugh at. I’ll never forget seeing Woody Allen’s “Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)” in Britain. In a pretty full theatre, I was the only person who laughed during the Italian-movie parody sequence when Allen says (in Italian, with English subtitles), “when we have sex, my wife lies there like a lox!”

In Germany, most foreign films are dubbed, but a handful of theatres catering to hard-core film-buffs (and English-speaking tourists) offer an “Originalversion.” So B and I went to see “Ocean’s Thirteen” in the Englishe Originalversion at the Sony Center "Cine Star" multiplex at Potsdamer Platz.



On our first attempt, a Sunday matinee, we arrived just a minute or two before showtime, but we figured there would be several minutes of commercials and trailers, so that we wouldn’t miss the beginning. The ticket lines were long, but I estimated we’d have our ticket in five minutes – plenty of time.

But I was applying time-motion study experience from American movie theatres. Here, the tickets were sold at a counter that looked like one set up for serious, involved transactions. Twenty yards or so long, staffed with half a dozen or more seated ticket sellers with two head-setted managers moving fussily behind them, answering phones and trouble-shooting, the ticket counter looked like a bank or a busy inter-city train station.

How slowly did the line move? Slow enough that the customers being served crossed their legs and leaned on the counter, airport style. Ticket purchase took, on average, a minute. That may not seem long, but do these two mental operations: (1) look at your watch for a minute while imagining buying a movie ticket in the States. (That’s right, it normally takes us Americans about 10 seconds – 15 if you banter with the ticket seller.) (2) Multiply the minute by the 15 people in front of us.

I quipped to B, “Do you think they’ll ask for our passports? I didn’t bring mine!” B replied, “We’re going to miss the beginning. Let’s leave.”

On our second attempt, a Friday night, a crowd of people were lined up halfway across the Sony Center. It turned out, though, that they were lining the man-ropes along a red carpet (in Germany, more of a heavy white construction paper) to see some B-list American Celebrity who was to show up for some sort of premiere thing. Jessica Alba, we were later uncertainly told.

The ticket lines were short – there were twice as many ticket sellers as before – and we breezed in early, the first ones in the theatre. While B and I often dither about where to sit in an empty theatre, here would couldn’t, because this theatre sells assigned seats.

There were 15 minutes of ads and trailers, followed by a short break. (We may well have made it the last time!) German moviegoers know this, so they purposely arrive late: the theatre only started filling up as the ads and trailers were rolling.

Memo to Robert Redford and his new Sundance Cinema concept: it is extremely annoying and needlessly anxious-making to have assigned seats in movies. I counted at least half a dozen disputes over who was in the right seat in the semi-darkness of the flickering screen, and for the first five minutes of the film I kept expecting someone to tap me on the shoulder and claim my seat.

I’m glad we didn’t miss the ads. They’re well made and visually clever (I couldn’t understand the language, of course), and I particularly enjoyed one about AIDS prevention in which a 20-something couple is involved in tasteful R-rated foreplay while two individually-wrapped condoms – animated in the style of the Pixar film “Cars” – keep up a snide running commentary.

After an ad for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, featuring “Cherry Garcia,” the house lights came up and in walked a vendor with a box strapped to his shoulders, baseball-stadium fashion, full of – can you guess? – Ben & Jerry’s. He hawked his wares by calling out the American flavor names: “Cherry Garcia”, “New York Fudge Brownie.” I particularly liked his germanicized version of “Chunky Monkey” in which he rolled over the k’s with a quick, hard “g”– “Chungy-mungy,” like it was a single word with the accent on "chung." I wondered whether the Germans would get the great pun behind Cherry Garcia, especially since they tend to pronounce “Jerry” by saying “Cherry” anyway. As in “Ben & Cherry.” And do they know that we “Ami’s” used to call the Germans “Jerries?” My mind began spinning.

The house lights went off again, and the ads resumed with one for beer. I wondered whether they’d stop again after this one so that a beer vendor could enter the theatre. No such luck. Most people had gotten their beer already, at the refreshment stand.

The movie finally began. “Ocean’s Thirteen” is perfect light entertainment for an expat feeling the first tugs of homesickness. You get to see many of your favorite American movie stars as you admire the slick Soderburgh Ocean franchise that, improbably, still works in its third iteration.


Sony Center, Potsdamer Platz, Berlin.

Only about halfway through did I notice that the “Englishe Originalversion” did not even have German subtitles. The mostly-German spectators were so fluent in English that they followed the dialogue without language aids, laughing at most of the jokes to boot. Most, but not all. They missed a few, including (perhaps especially) Matt Damon’s lascivious line to Ellen Barkin, “perhaps you should ask Mr. Wang yourself.”

After the movie, it was a perfect summer night at the Sony Center, warm and breezy with festive lighting and plenty of seats by the fountain where you could people watch – and get free WiFi.

During the Ardennes battle in December 1944 (aka the Battle of the Bulge), a German commando unit infiltrated American lines in captured U.S. vehicles wearing American army uniforms. German soldiers fluent in unaccented American English were recruited for the purpose. News of this infiltration, augmented by rumor, spread during the battle and caused a lot of panic.

As made famous in war movies, American MPs developed impromtu tests to distinguish friend from foe, basically quizzing suspected infiltrators on American trivia ("who plays shortstop for the Brooklyn Dodgers?" and the like.)

I was put in mind of this recently standing in front of a sausage counter in a Munich butcher shop. Like the French with their cheeses, so the Germans with their cold cuts and sausages: it seems that every village in the entire country has developed, over the centuries, its own special brand. The array of sausages and cold cuts is so bewildering that it would take years of study to master and at least several months to develop a working knowledge.



This would have been an effective way for the Germans to have exposed a non-German infiltrator during the war. "You will now look at these cold cuts and name them, please!"

After a couple of weeks of eating delicious but heavy German food, you start to feel full most of the time. But necessity is the mother of invention: I now unveil the "coffee and cake diet," which I will keep to for most of the rest of my stay in Berlin.

Heavy, but delicious, German food. Above and below: two versions of the German specialty called "eis bein," a cured and roasted pork knuckle. Note the "cocktail sausage" charmingly hung at the edge of the beer glass, below.

The coffee and cake diet is simple: eat a big meal early in the day -- a breakfast buffet, brunch, or a large early lunch -- followed by coffee and cake in the late afternoon. You're set until bed time!

This nutritional regimen received a big boost when our German friends gave us their national secret of how to make latte. It depends largely on a special milk steamer and a few tips for knowning when the milk is done. And voila -- professional, cafe-quality lattes in your own kitchen. (Pictured below with take-out cakes.)

In Split, we had lunch on this lovely piazza while waiting for our ferry.


In one of those "life imitates art, amost but not quite" moments, I ordered a "Coca-cola" and was given a bottle Pepsi. What was disappointing to me was not the switcheroo, but rather the failure of our Slavic waiter to say, "No Coke... Pepsi!" (For those of you too young to pick up the reference, it's John Belushi in the "Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger" skits on SNL.)

But my disappointment was fully redeemed a couple of days later, at a beachside cafe on Vis. I ordered an "Orangina," ubiquitous in European cafes, and the waitress said, "We do not have Orangina. We have 'Pipi.'"

Pipi -- a competing orange soda drink that appears to feature none other than Pippi Longstocking as its brand icon. Look at the pigtails!



Clearly, Pipi has grown up. Is it just me, or has Pipi turned out a bit ... slutty?

We returned from Vis 10 days ago, so I'm catching up on a blogging backlog by posting about it now.


Vis was dreamy ... just what I wanted a Mediterranean island to be. Three days of swimming off of rocks and tiny beaches in unworldly blue water that is so bouyantly salty you can float without effort. Lying in the sun. Eating meals with lots of fish and olive oil (okay, and goat swimming in an inch of clear fat) at restaurants where the waiter brings you a platter of raw, whole fish and you discuss with him which one you'll have cooked up, as he picks each up in turn and brandishes it at you, estimating its weight.



The small seaside town with narrow cobbled streets, old stone buildings with terra-cotta roofs and heavy wooden shutters. The sun so hot that everything shuts down in midday and you have no choice but to take a siesta, keeping your shutters just a bit ajar to let in a glimmer of sunlight and cool sea breezes.


And vivid, unforgettable colors -- especially the range of blues -- that these photos just don't capture.


The egg-shaped island of Vis has a town at each end and a few villages dotting the rugged inland parts. Its overall population is a few thousand, and far less than it was in earlier centuries.

The local inhabitants are very ambivalent about tourists. The town of Vis has only two hotels, the popular swimming areas are commercial under-exploited, and there is not a single sign pointing you to hillside cavern where Tito hid with his partisans for several months in 1943. On the other hand, though the nearby Croation island of Hvar, which has emerged as the chic alternative to the Greek islands, siphons off the majority of tourists, Vis gets its share. The waterfront is lined with restaurants and the jetty crammed with tourist's sailboats most of the week. The same babel of languages one hears in Split can be heard in Vis.




There is something vaguely unsettling about being a tourist there. Many Croatians seem to speak good English, but they seem begrudging about your presence there -- similar to my impression of the Poles. Is it a Slavic thing? A post-communism first-world/ second-world thing?

Or is it the fact that they only recently faught a bloody civil war? Miloje, our Serbian host, has been comfortable going to Vis only for the last three years and some of here family will not set foot there. In the last hundred years, the Balkans have seen more war, and more recently, than any other part of Europe, and contemporary Croatian nationalism openly harkens back to the Ustazi faction that in its day had sought an alliance with the Nazis.

I would not return there without having friends to visit, yet I am so glad I went.

The conversation with our German friends wound around to the subject of misapprehended song lyrics. You know the phenomenon: the singer enunciates the lyrics badly, so you painstakingly puzzle out what you think he’s singing, and you get it wrong. Or you hear the lyrics as a kid and, with your young person’s understanding and limited experience with the awkward or archaic phrasings of many songs, you fill in what seems plausible.

Well-known example, from Flashdance: “... take your pants off/ and make it happ-punn...”

What started us on this topic was a similar plausible mistake B and I heard while walking past the "Englisher Garten" in Berlin's Tiergarten. An outdoor garden party was being regaled by a German lounge singer doing American covers. He sang: "Sittin' at the top of the bay/ watching the way-aay-aves roll in..." Otis Redding is still big in Europe.

The mistaken lyrics conversation is difficult to have across a language divide. Inevitably, the bilingual folks say,

in the original German, the lyrics are supposed to be "floiner schpechh beloyten," but I always thought it was "floineh schpechh beluyrten,” which means “spank on the bottom.” So you see, it is very funny.

But I learned something important in this conversation. Basically, I learned that the correct lyric to the English version of the Christmas carol “Silent Night,” is “round yon virgin mother and child.” Not, as I thought until just now, “proud young virgin mother and child.” At my age!

In fairness to me, my version makes sense – sense, that is, once one accepts the premise of the virgin birth. I mean, in her situation, who wouldn’t rightfully feel a wee bit proud?

B and I are in the south German resort town of Lindau, on the northeastern corner of Lake Constance, with beautiful views of the Austrian and Swiss Alps.

Here we are relaxing in old world elegance in the lobby of the Hotel Bayerischer Hof.



Doing what, exactly?

I feel compelled to begin this story near the end:

... And so, having led his donkey into the restaurant, Darko fed it from a bowl, as the Slovenians at the next table looked on, laughing and pointing.

Maybe I should back up.

When our hosts, Miloje and Miroslav, told us that one dinner possibility was a “rustic” restaurant in a small village in the mountainous center of the Island – and that you had to call a day ahead and order goat or lamb (presumably so he’d have time to kill the animal?) – how could we say no? Plus, the guy’s name is “Darko.” How cool is that?

Darko runs apparently all operations of the restaurant himself ... and I mean all operations. He raises his own animals, and cooks them, makes his own wine and liqueur from grapes he grows himself, and makes salad and side dishes from home grown vegetables. He does his own baking. And he waits the tables.


The “restaurant” itself consists of a patio – probably the patio of Darko’s house – with four wooden picnic tables, two of which appear to be the sort of massive wooden spools used for coils of large wire, turned on their side. At one edge of the patio is a small shed which houses the oven and a larder. And the patio is covered with a bower of vines so dense that you feel like you’re indoors.


Left: the vinous roof. Right: the dining area, with cooking shed in the background.

Darko cooks the meat in a brick oven by covering a large metal dish full of meat with a metal dome and sliding it right next to the fire.


On the left side is the covering pan, on the right a dish of octopus pre-ordered by other diners.

And he seasons the meat simply, with “a little bit of salt,” pursuant to his theory that the flavor comes from the grass and herbs the animals feed on.



In the photo above, you can see the main course, which stuffed four adults. In the background, a pitcher of strong homemade wine proved crucial to cut through the "clear gravy" (see below). The round black thing in about the middle of the meat platter is a rock. Darko told us that (from the current vantage point) the lamb was to the left of the rock, the goat to the right. Why did he cook with a rock, Miroslav asked. Because, Darko replied, people always ask him about the rock and he gets a big kick out of that.

When Miloje and Miroslav had called to reserve a place, they asked Darko if it was okay to bring their dog. He said that would be no problem, so long as the dog wouldn’t mind his donkey, which, he promised, would bray “hee-haw” at us when we arrived. None of us could figure out whether Darko was kidding, and as it turned out there was no donkey to greet us. But when other guests arrived – the Slovenians, according to our hosts, who ID’d them by their dialect – we did hear the donkey braying.

The meat was incredibly good. I don’t know whether I preferred the lamb or the milder-tasting (!) goat. Or the potatoes. It was deliciously salty, and I couldn’t get enough of the almost clear gravy the meat was floating in, which I kept spooning over my meat and potatoes.

It was only when the demolished meat platter was removed that I realized that the clear “gravy” was actually fat, and that I may well have consumed about half a cup of clear, liquid fat in addition to what was already in the meat. Thinking back a few years to an unfortunate experience I’d had with barbecued ribs back in the States, I realized that the entire tone of the blog post I was already writing in my head hung in the balance, on the delicate question of whether I’d ultimately keep this food down. When I awoke at 5 a.m. the next morning, I found myself incredibly thirsty and with a meat hangover. But I was basically in one piece.

Darko, a curly-haired man in his late 40s or early 50s, looks like he’s “been through the wars,” and for a resident of former Yugoslavia, this could literally be true. He’s very jolly, and he bantered continually with our hosts, finding some occasion for a hearty laugh with each course.

At the end, he asked how we enjoyed the meal, and Miroslav said that everything was wonderful except that we were disappointed that the donkey did not greet us personally. Darko took this literally. Which brings me back to where this post began.

While standing in the checkout line at Media Markt, waiting to purchase my new 20 euro photo-card reader, I snapped a quick photo. The cashier said:

"You're not supposed to take photos inside."

"Oh, sorry," I replied.

"You must delete it."

Okay. My, but we're sensitive about ... what? The brilliant store layout, which looks like a bargain basement version of Best Buy? I realize that the look of the store's merchandise displays is proprietary, but please. As if the competition isn't sending around dozens of spies who get loads of info without obviously taking pictures.

Or was it a concern that maybe I'd reverse engineer the exceedingly clever gadget that was the subject of my photo. I photographed it because it was about as clever a bit of engineering as the hat with the beer-can holders and straws.

In fact, it was a remove control device with a bottle opener attached to the bottom. In other words, the Germans had managed to crack this very difficult engineering problem:



Unfortunately, I can't show you the photo of the actual device. When she said I had to delete it I meekly showed her my photo replay and was ready to delete it in front of her. But she muttered, "that's okay."

So I got to keep the photo. Only it was lost with all the others when my photo-disk malfunctioned.

I'd make a lousy spy.

Our flight from Berlin went non-stop into the Croation port city of Split. From there we were to take a ferry to the Island of Vis, where our friends – a “mixed” couple, a Serb married to a Croat – were waiting for us.

It seems as though the strange weather in Berlin followed us, as a huge thunderstorm broke just as our airport bus set off on the half-hour ride to the harbor in Split. The roads were narrow and I wondered about safety, particularly when the driver turned fully around in his seat to tell one of the passengers to close the trap door in the roof, which was now letting in rain. Normally, I wouldn’t have thought much of it, except that the passenger didn’t speak Croation and the driver needed about 15 seconds worth of hand gesturing to make his point. Luckily, the driver had a crucifix hanging from his rear-view mirror, which protected us.



Split is a large industrial city – the second largest in Croatia I believe – but the harbor, on the edge of Split’s old town, comes straight out of one’s imagination of the small Mediterranean port. Stone buildings bleached white by the Mediterranean sun, set off with painted shutters. A long waterside promenade. Boats of every description.



In the Split harbor, one finds a Babel of international tourists. In addition to local Croats and other Balkan peoples, there are Austrians, Germans, Czechs, Slovaks, Italians, French, Brits, East Asians, and a fair number of Americans. Some of this you get from the languages and accents you hear, some from the look of the people, some from the car license plates you see around.


Split is the embarkation point for several Adriatic Islands, the most popular and trendy being Hvar, and you can even ferry to the eastern coast of Italy. It is also the source of numerous small steamship cruises and saiboat charters.

The steamships look charming at first glance, but lose some of their luster when you think ahead to what the trip would actually be like – cooped up in a confined space with a couple of dozen strangers. Fun for a day or two, but for more than that?



The sailboats, I believe, can be rented for sailing on your own, with larger skippered boats available for charter.(I can’t use the word “skipper” in this context without thinking of Gilligan’s Island.)

And then of course you see the occasional outrageous yacht. One, parked along the quay in split, was about 120 feet long and its Cayman Island registry bespoke massive amounts of money moved “offshore.”

“Your tax dollars not at work,” quipped B.




I was particularly enthralled by the contrast between our relatively quiet Tuesday afternoon departure, and our Saturday morning return. Saturday morning is apparently when most rentals and charters begin, and the quays were filled with boats moored three and four deep.

Below: the same part of the quay, Tuesday and Saturday:





There’s a travel tip for Mediterranean ports: if you don’t like crowds, try to avoid Saturday mornings.

...about Berlin's desperation shortage of free WiFi?

One of the few public spaces in Berlin offering free WiFi is (ironically) the hyper-commercial Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz.



Nice work space, huh?

Modern-day Germans simply do not conform to the longstanding stereotype of the authoritarian personality. As on my previous (and first) trip to Germany, I’ve found it a pleasant surprise – indeed a revelation – that Germans are for the most part pretty laid back.

Where is the tyrannical train conductor, the overbearing policeman, the scary passport official, the stentorian shopkeeper? Where is the ubiquitous, unsmiling “Helmut” to tell you that your attempted behavior “is forbidden” or to castigate you for not sitting in your assigned seat? My goodness, here in Germany you can even jay-walk with total impunity.

Passport control for our flight to a non-EU country was a little booth just outside our departure lounge. It was also right across a narrow walkway from the restrooms. This made for a chaotic queue, as folks seeming to be on line would abruptly duck into the restroom, or people emerging from the restroom seemed to be forming part of (or cutting into) the line. Not to mention those needing simply to pass through the corridor to other gates. The setup seemed to lend itself to espionage, and for a passing moment I wondered whether my own trip to the restroom placed me under suspicion.

But it was all so caz! Even more casual was the boarding process. Without the benefit of an announcement, it became apparent that it was time to line up at the gate because the passengers – first a trickle, then building into a general flood – began to get up from their seats in the departure lounge and crowd toward the jetway entrance. “Lining up” does not in anyway describe the procedure. It was not even what Calvin Trillin has called a “French queue” (a triangle with its base at the service counter). It was more like taking a corked bottle halfway filled with marbles and flipping it over. We cascaded down toward the choke-point (the barred jetway entrance) until we formed a tight matrix. What stopped people from cutting in front of you was not any sort of queue-courtesy, but mere physics.

Only then was our flight announced, together with a call for “preboarding” – the usual call for “passengers with small children and those in need of special assistance.” I saw no elderly or disabled person, but the matrix of marbles shuddered as the largest influx of “passengers with young children” I’ve ever seen on an airplane flight forced their way forward. “Small children” was spaciously construed to include anyone below their teens. Not that there weren’t infants galore, along with large car seats and massive baby bags. It was apparent that this “pre-board” would fill half the plane – it was as if Noah’s ark were “pre-boarded” with a call for “all creatures with four legs or more.”

I should point out that this flight was one of those European budget airlines – “German Wings” – which uses unassigned, first-come/ first-served seating. A boarding priority is theoretically assigned by numbering each boarding pass sequentially, starting with #1, based on time of check-in. And B, who adeptly plays the angles in travel situations, had gotten us boarding passes #1 and #2 by checking in on line the day before.

This splendid coup was undermined somewhat by the “pre-boarding” process, and took another hit with the next announcement – “we will now board passengers with boarding passes number 1 through 30.” But our boarding advantage disappeared entirely when it became plain that no one was bothering with boarding pass numbers – not the passengers, not the ticket-takers. The cork was simply removed from the bottle, and the marbles rolled out and onto the plane.

Well, more accurately, onto the tarmac. I guess “jetway” was a misnomer, since it was just a staircase, and we passengers were directed to the plane by a sequence of traffic cones and airport workers hopefully placed to avoid unfortunate collisions with tarmac vehicles, baggage handlers and running jet turbines.

Where is Helmut when you need him? He might have been quite useful up to this point. It was then, as we stepped onto the plane, that our craving for order got the better of us, and B politely and foolishly asked the male flight attendant whether our rolling bag “would fit in the overhead compartment.” A foolish question because it’s a bag designed to fit into any normal-sized overhead compartment and a quick look down the aisle would have revealed two dozen instances of passengers with much larger and heavier baggage: heart-attacks- and back-injuries-waiting-to-happen that they were manhandling into the overhead bins. Our bag, at 20-22 lbs, was no heavier than my book-and-laptop filled napsack.

“No,” said the flight attendant in crisp German-accented English, “it is far too heavy. You will have to place it under the seat in front of you.”

I’ve never understood this instruction, which is always given but, sensibly, never enforced on U.S. flights, since the space under the seat in front of you is about the same size as that in the overhead bin. So B quite sensibly ignored the instruction, and when she got halfway down the plane to the exit row, put the bag in the overhead bin, and plopped down into the window seat.

Before I could even get my napsack up there, the flight attendant was on me.

“You cannot put your luggage up there!” He was positively vibrating with restrained fury. I quickly inspected his face for veins about that might be about to burst. “I have told you this, yet you have done so anyway. This is not okay!”

I had finally found him. It was none other than Helmut, the authoritarian German. So good was he at his role that he could make the phrase “not okay” sound very threatening indeed, and I began to worry that he would put us off the plane.

“I’m... sorry...” I stammered. A female flight attendant quickly whisked us and our offensive bag toward the back of the plane. She ended up having the bag checked into the cargo hold. B asked why our bag was a problem when all those others....

“I do not understand him,” said the female flight attendant.

Nor I. If only Helmut could be trained to work for rational order...

As correctly guessed by Nina and Brock20, our recent trip outside of Berlin was to the Dalmatian Coast of Croatia. Specifically, to the town of Vis (a/k/a Issa to the Greeks) on the Island of the same name. (See map.)

How we got there, and what we did, to follow.

But first a question. I want to be able to say that I’ve now vacationed on “a Mediterranean Island.” Yes, I know that Vis is technically in the Adriatic Sea. But isn’t the Adriatic Sea simply a subsection, a neighborhood if you will, of the Mediterranean Sea? Like the Bay of Biscay is part of the Atlantic Ocean? B insists not – the Adriatic (and presumably the Aegean, etc.) is a “separate” sea.

I say you can rightfully claim you’ve “been to Manhattan” even if you spent your entire stay in the Upper West Side. It doesn’t mean there isn’t more of Manhattan still to see.

On the morning of Tuesday, July 3, B and I reached our neighborhood S-Bahn station to take the train to the airport. We had a plan to reach Schonefeld Airport 2 hours and 16 minutes before our international flight, fitting each piece together like a Swiss watch.

6:15 – wake up (alarm)
6:45 – leave apartment
6:50 – stop at bakery
6:55 – walk to S-Bahn station (20 min)
7:15 – arrive S-Bahn station
7:19 – board train for Schonefeld
7:59 – arrive Schonefeld

Even if we were to miss the 7:19, another Schonefeld train would be along at 7:39, and we’d still be almost two hours early. We were so confident in our planning that, B, who is usually quite the Germanic task master on travel timetable issues, proposed an unscheduled stop at Coffeemama’s which would, I calculated, have made it tight even to catch the 7:39.

I was the nervous one this morning, so I vetoed Coffeemama’s and when I saw the train sitting inside the station, I started to move fast. But when we reached the platform, the train was obviously lifeless and going nowhere.

One of the more disconcerting moments in foreign travel is when you waiting for, or riding on, a public conveyance of some sort and you hear an untranslated announcement in a language you don’t understand. You don’t know whether they’re saying, “the train for [your destination] has been relocated to track 5,” or “the train for [someone else’s destination] has been relocated to track 5,” or “Please calmly exit the station, there is a bomb threat.” Instead, you simply hear “blah blah blah Schonefeld blah blah five.” Or “please blah blah blah.” And the people standing around with you collectively heave a sigh and slouch toward the exit, and you follow like a lemming. Or worse, half the people around you sigh and slouch toward the exit, and you have to decide whether you’re group is the leavers or the stayers.

But this particular morning, the train platform was sparsely peopled, so when the situation was explained by the incomprehensible (to me) announcement over the PA system, it was impossible to infer what it said from the other passengers’ movements. A telltale, 3-word phrase flashed on the “next train” signs over the platform, so I got out my Langenscheidt Pocket German Dictionary and painstakingly translated:

Please ... listen for ... announcement

With insipient not-quite panic beginning to form in the bottom of my stomach like the first signs of nausea, I tracked down a station agent having coffee in the breakroom, and said, “Keine bahn?” by which I meant something like “no train?” She replied in German, and I was pretty sure she was telling me that the S-Bahn (the elevated train) was not running, but the U-Bahn (underground) was.

A host of questions presented themselves. Was the S-Bahn stopped only on certain lines – in central Berlin perhaps – so that we could catch it elsewhere, or was the entire S-Bahn down... and for how long? Did the U-Bahn go out to Schonefeld? And, with the U-Bahn functioning more like a local compared to the S-Bahn’s express, how long would it take?

Or should we just try to catch a taxi? Our neighborhood is not a good one for spontaneous taxi-hailing. The “plan B” that hastily materialized as we double-timed it, bumping our rolling suitcase over cobblestones, was to try the front entrance to the local hotel, and if that were to fail (which it did), to hustle to the U-Bahn. Not to make it all the way to Schonefeld, but rather to catch a taxi in front of Zoologisher Bahnhof, one of the larger Berlin train stations.

Not a perfect plan. B and I had visions of a New York City commuter rail shutdown, where every commuting soul in the tri-state area would naturally get in his or her car and jam the hell out of the already bumber-to-bumper highway traffic into the city. And in Berlin, which has no centralized downtown, we’d get LA style traffic – stop and go in all directions. That is if we could even find a cab – thinking again of New York, where available taxis become scarce during any rainstorm or transportation hiccup.

But there were several taxis waiting in front of the train station. And our super-mellow driver, a distinguished-looking man in his late 50s whose radio (and life, it seemed) was tuned to light jazz, got us to the airport in 45 minutes despite never exceeding an unhurried 50 m.p.h. This wasn’t due to traffic – there was no traffic. 8:15 a.m. in a major city during a transit shutdown, and the traffic was as light as 11 p.m. in LA.

The driver told us that there was a railroad strike affecting the intercity and S-Bahn trains. And of course there’d be no extra traffic, because people could still take the U-Bahn or buses. And because, in Germany, if a rail strike makes it too difficult to get into work, that counts as a valid excuse to stay home for the day.

What bothered me most was feeling so out of touch that I didn’t even know the long-announced strike was going to happen. The German word for “strike” is “streik,” and had I simply glanced at the Berliner Zeitung and seen “Bahn” and “Streik” in the same headline, I’d have had the sense to ask around.

Back in Berlin as of Saturday evening, yet I've barely had time to blog. I won't bore you with the details, but it has something to do with wireless internet access limited to cafes a few train stops away from our apartment. I just have to face up to the fact that I've developed a dependency on reliable internet access (preferably at home) and will have to factor that into future long-stay travel plans.

Today I ordered coffee to go from our neighborhood cafe, "Coffeemamas." It may not seem like such a big deal to order coffee to go, but it struck me that in four trips to Europe since 1999 (totaling perhaps 90 days and counting), this is the very first time I've ordered coffee to go.

The to go order had less to do with being in a hurry than that we hit Coffeemamas during its strange mid-morning rush. At about 10:30, the quiet coffee shop is set upon by about 30 people who all seem to know each other -- no doubt a regularly-scheduled coffee break at a large neighborhood employer.

Waiting on line to order my latte, I realized that I'd forgotten the German phrase for "take out," and I started obsessing about the best way to say it in English. Would the German barista be more familiar with the American "to go" or the British "to take away"? Germans seem to prefer American to British culture, but maybe their language instruction and experience is more likely to be British-influenced, Britain being so much more accessible as a matter of travel. And when you visit German websites, the link to the English-language version of the web page is almost invariably a British flag, rarely an American one. Same with train ticket machines and ATMs.

"Latte, bitte. To take away," I said. I must have made the right choice, because I was understood. And they gave me this:

B and I are taking our first side trip away from Berlin. I don't know how much internet access there will be and so we're probably not even taking our computers. So if you hear nothing from me until this coming Saturday or Sunday, don't worry!

Where are we going? Here's a clue:

I don’t know if there’s any special significance, back in the States, to July 1, but it’s as if the gods of American tourism said, “Smithers... release the hounds.” For that suddenly, Berlin was beset by American tourists. Maybe people naturally plan their trips to begin at the beginning of the month.

Not that I have any right to complain. Being as how I’m an American tourist and all. Not having brushed up on even some limited tourist German for this trip, I’m not even attempting German in my interactions aside from: numerals, “yes,” “please,” “thank you,” “excuse me,” “do you have [item identified in English],” “do you speak English? and “and.”

The old saw, “they all speak English” seems a bit less true than I remember from my trip two years ago. Now it seems like around half of them do, maybe less. But a great majority show a fairly patient willingness to try to communicate, a charming quality traditionally attributed to the Italians, and so you can get by. Still, if I ever come back here, there will be serious language learning attempted.

Speaking of things American, there’s something of a buzz about Tom Cruise going on around here. It appears that Cruise is portraying Claus von Stauffenberg in a movie now filming. Staffenberg was the aristocratic German army officer who attempted to assassinate Hitler in July 1944. The Germans, bless them, are so very keen on rejecting their Nazi past that they’ve built Stauffenberg into a great hero, and many of them are uncomfortable with having that role played by a Scientologist – which the Germans reasonably view as an authoritarian cult.

You won’t ever hear me praise suicide bombers, but the fact is that Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt failed because of his determination to survive. Stauffenberg placed the briefcase bomb under the map table around which Hitler was conferencing with several of his generals, and then slipped out of the room, having set the bomb to detonate long afterward to give himself time to escape the Fuhrer’s heavily guarded compound. Someone inadvertently kicked the briefcase behind a heavy oaken table support, which effectively shielded Hitler from the bomb blast. The coup attempt failed, of course, and Stauffenberg wound up dead anyway in the wave of executions that followed.

But let’s go back to happier thoughts. The other half of this post’s title is something I overheard an American tourist say here in Starbucks. Speaking on his Blue Tooth or whatever cell phone headset device it was, he said, “I have two items to go over. Item number 1, I love you.”

It sounds sort of sweet in print, but believe me, in person it sounded officious. But it did put me in mind of the lovely walk B and I took through the Tiergarten yesterday, Sunday, July 1. Yes, the hounds had been released. But love was in the air. Couples everywhere!

Blue Man group was in fact playing in Vegas when I was there back in January. Now they've followed me to Berlin.



Or have they? Maybe Blue Man Group is a franchise and they can play multiple places at the same time, like another once-fresh act now entrenched in Vegas, Cirque du Soleil.

I saw a Blue Man Group concert on TiVo. I was amazed at the percussion sounds they were able to acheive with clever deployment of PVC tubing. After 15 minutes, I was bored nearly senseless. I think you pretty much have to be stoned to watch those guys for more than the 15 minutes.



So, no, the show is not suitable for this foreign tourist.

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Sorry about the blurry photos. Will try to update with sharper ones. See what the frustration of losing my photos does to me?

On the flight from Zurich into Berlin, B chatted up a German guy sitting at the end of our row. Her immediate goal was to see if he knew the price of a taxi from the airport, but the guy had lived in Chicago and the conversation was fairly wide-ranging in the time that it took from touching down to the seatbelt sign winking off. One of his comments was that temperatures in Berlin at this time of year (which he thoughtfully translated for us into Farenheit) "can be anywhere between 50 and 100."

He wasn't kidding. Daily temperatures have ranged 25 degrees between morning and night, and from day to day we've gotten low 50s with high 80s expected tomorrow. You really have to layer for this weather.

For the past couple of days, the weather seems to come in 1-hour units, beginning with brooding overcast skies, then wind, then a 10-15 minute rainshower, then clearing to sunny and warm. Next hour, the cycle repeats.

I find this kind of weather uplifting. For one thing, it makes me feel so smart for toting my packable Marmot Mountain waterproof rain jacket. For another, I find continuous sunshine to be so overrated -- this weather is much more entertaining.

But lets indulge in the overused metaphor of storm clouds for brooding bad moods. Which brings me to blogging. It turns out that my photo problem was not the card reader, but rather the photo memory card itself -- my film as it were. I learned this only after spending an engaging half day dragging B from one photoshop to another in a vain hunt for a new card reader, which ended successfully in an outdoor shopping arcade in the Charlottenburg district at the German Equivalent of Best Buy (to quote Voxwoman's comment to the previous post).

All the photos from the start of the trip until yesterday afternoon are inaccessible -- either gone forever, or else recoverable only with some clever techno-fix that will not be attempted here in Europe.

This is too bad. I now realize that the photos for me are a journal, containing not only a visual record of what I do, but also of my mental impressions of what I see. They're pictoral notes for my blog posts. I have post ideas written around them. I mean, I could verbally describe for you the smoking lounge in the Zurich airport, with its glass facade bearing the Camel Cigarette decal with the label -- in English -- "Cigarettes harm your health." But it would be so much better to actually show you the picture before riffing on the irony of that.

Some of the photos are things that I'll re-photograph. But some are just gone, like faded memory.