Berlin

We flew to Berlin on Saturday. We took the Blue Metro to the last stop and got on the airport bus so the trip was covered by our monthly pass. The only trouble was that our flight to Munich was delayed an hour and a half, which meant we would miss our connection from Munich to Berlin. Lufthansa gave no explanation at all, which was duly noted on the satisfaction survey we were given at the end of the flight. We were booked on the next flight to Berlin and had some time to spend in Munich. While at the airport we found a store that sold stuffed animals, including lambs. Our grandson is really into lambs like other kids are into blankets or teddy bears. Tari was looking around and found a wolf in sheep’s clothing. We bought it and plan to add “Wolfie” to our grandson’s flock.

We were a bit anxious about the delays since we desperately needed to exchange dollars for Euros in order to pay for the registration in cash. We had ‘gambled’ correctly that the Euro would fall. But the currency exchanges closed at 8pm on Saturday and would not open again until Monday morning. We got to Berlin, hopped on the TXL bus that wound its way through the city, but terminated at Alexanderplatz, where our hotel was. We got off and finally found the Park Inn hotel entrance. We went to the concierge who directed us to the currency exchange in the train station. We found it at 7:35 but it looked closed. We paced back and forth wondering what to do when suddenly someone else opened the door. We dashed in and got our dollars changed. We then went back to the hotel and up to the restaurant where Fulbright was sponsoring a dinner for early arrivals. It was almost 8pm and we asked if the Fulbright dinner was still on. Since it was a giant buffet they said no problem. So we found a table with the requisite green paper napkins, parked our luggage and took turns going to the buffet. After eating we finally checked in.

The Fulbright Seminar in Berlin brings together the American Fulbrighters in Germany and other European countries along with those German students selected to study in US academic year 2010-11. The number attending the seminar, including spouses and significant others was over 500. Our name tags had our name and Hungary, while the American Fulbrighters in Germany had the name of their German university or location. The German students going to the US in the fall had their names, their German University and then in very small letters, their US destination school.

Tari found one couple who had Romania on their nametags. We found out they were in Cluj where we were going next week. So we sat with Darius and Catherine Brubeck for dinner. He was teaching jazz music (being the son of Dave Brubeck), but we talked about a lot of things ranging from health care reform which was being voted on that day to grandchildren. On Tuesday night Darius played at a Fulbright music gala that included performances by several other Fulbright musicians and singers.

Tari and I “networked” with some students. One was going to visit Budapest next week and we talked about what she should see. She then added she was going to Poland; Tari mentioned that one of the Fulbrighters in Hungary was going to Poland. On our way out we met Lori and brought her back to the student’s table to introduce them.

German shops are closed from late Saturday afternoon until Monday morning. But for some reason, this Sunday was one of the handful of exceptions during the year. As a result the stores were open. We went to the Galeria department store across from the hotel. On the fifth floor in house wares we found an oven thermometer which we purchased on the spot. We can take it back to Budapest and then perhaps mark up the oven knob for major temperature settings.

The opening session was entitled “When will my money be safe?” The first speaker was a managing partner in a Frankfurt investing firm. As with most economists, he started with what I thought was an untenable assumption: that all market bubbles were not over until the downside bottomed out at the point where the bubble first started expanding. He was some sort of free market economist who firmly believed that the market was a zero sum game. That is, all market losses should be accounted for and the lost value transferred to someone else; in the current downturn he argued that the value transferred from the West to China. He was convinced that a second mortgage collapse in the US was imminent because too many middle class had taken out loans on second or even third homes about three years earlier (but of course no one I knew did that). Finally turning to the hot topic of the day, he thought that the EU should not try to bail out Greece, or possibly Ireland, Portugal and Spain (facetiously known as the PIGS), after all would the US bail out California or Illinois?

Some of the other seminar panels were better than expected. A set of project reports mostly by research students were well chosen and were more interesting than their narrow titles suggested. In another session seven Fulbrighters discussed their experiences and the challenges they faced. None of them, however, was a visiting lecturer like me and so I thought a perspective was missing. The Fulbright Alumni Association encouraged everyone to keep in touch when they returned. Perhaps the most interesting session featured a visiting political science professor who wrote a book on the Berlin wall and a German who was the former coordinator of German American relations and a former politician. His historical and political insights were fantastic. He said that Germany in particular believed that social democracy required keeping the lower classes involved politically and this meant providing social support and welfare programs as compared to the US where the lower classes were not encouraged to participate politically. In answer to a question he pointed out that denial and conspiracy theories are an indication of an anti-democratic mentality whether it was of the holocaust, the moon landing, 9-11 or Darwinian evolution.

I found Berlin frustrating in one respect. I cannot find things on the street that I see on the maps. The U and S Bahn (metros) are well marked on the map, but we had difficulty finding out where we were once we got to street level, as streets go off in at least five directions. We have been in cities lacking strict grid patterns like Paris or Vienna, but those have a ring and spoke pattern that is easy enough to follow. Many cities grew up around a castle with several defensive walls, but I was told that Berlin was a merger of two cities that expanded into each other and then grew out to absorb other nearby towns. Travel by conference or city buses were along broad avenues that gently twisted and turned through the city, giving a false impression of straight direction, but again once off the bus it took a few minutes to figure out which of several streets we wanted to go down. Several times we were intently studying our maps when we heard a bell because we were in the middle of the bicycle lane and had to move out of the way.

After several meals in the Park Inn restaurant/buffet, I jokingly said to Tari, “Let’s eat at a real German restaurant." So she went though a handout Berlin guide and found a small list of regional restaurants, one was on Grosse Hamburger only a few blocks from Alexanderplatz. But of course we walked several block out of our way before we figured out how to get there. Another night I wanted wiener schnitzel and found an Austrian restaurant on Bergmann Str. But what seemed like a few short blocks from the U-Bahn station turned out to be several very long ones. When we got to the restaurant we found the first opening for two would be in an hour and a half. We retraced our steps and found another Austrian restaurant. The food at both restaurants we ate at was very good.

During free time on Tuesday Tari and I walked down Unter den Linden (although it was too early for the trees to have leaves.) to the Brandenburg gate. We went over to the holocaust memorial, an interesting array of stone slabs of different heights on a somewhat rolling surface. You could walk down and be overwhelmed as if lost in a maze except for the precise grid pattern that allowed you to get out straight ahead or to either side. We continued on to Checkpoint Charlie, a shack in the middle of the street, a symbolic memento of the cold war. Several of the senior people attending the Seminar had been to Berlin while the wall was up and more had travelled to Berlin when the wall came down in 1989. I suspect the city had an enthralling tension that appealed to them that I didn’t feel. It turns out that several years after the wall was torn down, people wanted to know where it had been, so a double row of bricks now marks its former encirclement of West Berlin. Nevertheless a few days later in Potsdamer Platz I swuccumbed. I paid 2,50 Euro to have the last page of my passport stamped with the official 1960’s border crossing visas and Tari took a picture of me in front of one of the wall segments.

On Thursday we went with fellow Hungarian Fulbrighters the Kellems to Schloss Charlotte, and saw the private rooms. On Friday Tari and I spent almost five hours in the Pergamon Museum looking at the Greek edifices and sculptures and the Gates of Ishtar along with other Mesopotamian statues and artifacts.

The Fulbright Seminar ended on Thursday and I thought I would save a few Euros by moving to a slightly cheaper hotel for the extra two nights. But I hadn’t noticed that the breakfast was not included and that brought it back up to the price at the Park Inn. The Fulbright must have gotten a fantastic rate at the Park Inn for taking several hundred rooms. Our new lodgings were more minimalist than hotels we have stayed at in Japan—no dressers or closets, or bars of soap (only small containers of body shampoo wash), and only one wall plug in the whole room.