Colloquium

Every Tuesday evening during the semesters there is a colloquium on library topics. I serve as the host for this, which means I introduce the speakers and manage the discussion. Today we had two speakers out of Croatia, who gave their presentations in English. A couple of us wondered whether the colloquium would be well attended. Happily there was very nearly standing room only, and the students took an active role in asking questions. I was quite pleased with how good their English was. It makes me think I could reasonably use more English in my lectures and seminars.

The topic was library education in Croatia, which has the unusual situation of a new law that requires that all librarians have a university-based library degree. This means that there is a signifiant demand for the students. They also founded a program in publishing as part of the library school, and have good relationships with the publishers in the country.

Croatia is small, and perhaps because of that they have been aggressive in finding outside partners. Rutgers in New Jersey is one partner. Others are in Italy and Austria. Most courses are offered in English whenever a non-Croatian student takes part. This means that every student must be fully prepared to function in English as well as Croatian. As they said, the English may not be perfect, but it suffices for communication.

Student jobs

After class today, I had a conversation with a number of masters students about their job prospects. Students everywhere are always worried about getting that all-important first job, after which all future employment becomes easier, and German students are no exception. They have, however, less institutional infrastructure to help them.

One of the real problems they face is that Germany does not have a single source of accreditation, like the ALA in the US. Each state within Germany has its own standards for hiring librarians. Humboldt's distance-education program has an excellent set of contracts with the various states, but those contracts do not apply to the regular masters program. This leaves students in the awkward position of having an intellectually serious degree that fits the standard employment model so badly that people from the German equivalent to trade schools have an advantage in the job market. Our students need an advocate and I promised to do what I could.

Happily the problem may grow less with the "new" masters program that was designed to meet the pan-European reqirements for accreditation, though of course old employment habits die hard. Despite these worries our students do get jobs, often rather good ones.

We are having the second ever alumni meeting this Saturday, and I will be curious what it is like. I may talk to them about helping our job seekers.

Meera (Berlin's best restaurant)

I had dinner tonight at Meera, a restaurant at Leibnitzstrasse 45 in Charlottenburg that we visited years ago when it first opened. I worried about it at one time because getting a new restaurant started is a tricky business and at times we seemed to be the only visitors. Clearly it is doing well now. The food is inclined toward the Mediterranean with lots of excellent fish. Tonight I had spaghetti arrabiata and a salad with lots of mushrooms. In my opinion it is the best place to eat in Berlin. The fact that they remember me whenever I go in also adds some charm.

I looked at more apartments today, first walking to the le Corbusier Building from the Heerstr S-Bahn stop. The area is very green and pretty.

Then I looked at more places in the Hansa Quarter, incuding the building in the picture to the right. I did not see the actual apartment, only a model one room place that had just been fully renovated and looked great. The apartment we are interested in will not be available for viewing until December, but they plan to make special arrangements when Joan comes. If it is at all like the one I saw, it is a very reasonable prospect.

Afterwards I had planned to go to the Bode Museum, which has just reopened, but the line to get in stretched way outside the building.

A Saturday in late October

What does one do in Beriln on a Saturday in late October? I spent the morning on a task that I have not done with regularity for over 20 years: my own laundry. In our usual division of labor, this is my wife's job, while I do the shopping. This morning I even very bravely ironed a shirt.

After that essential task, I went looking at more housing possibililtes. Our real estate agent did not have time for me this week (which is a bit troublesome), but I went to a building on the to-be-seen list that is very nearby. It is impressively yellow (see picture) and clearly has had some significant modernization done in very recent times. The ground floor has a restaurant and a language school. The area is residential, with a bakery and grocery a scant 5 minutes away.

I also went to the Galleria Kaufhaus at Alexanderplatz. Alexanderplatz is famous both for the Döblin novel ("Berlin Alexanderplatz") and for the police headquarters (which is still there). The Kaufhaus (department store) was clearly a popular distination for Berliners. It was as crowded as if this were the week-end before Christmas. I need to buy new running shoes that would absorb the shock of the hard Berlin pavements. One of the great advantages of Berlin department stores is that they have staff who can give serious and intelligent advice. I now know more about the various forms of padding and support in running shoes than I thought possible. In the end I bought shoes that not only buffer against hard pavements but help to hold my foot straight.

The rest of the day I spent preparing my lecture, since I had no time in the office yesterday to get anything useful done.

Ausländerbehörde (Office for Foreigners)

I had an appointmen to register at the Ausländerbehörde today, which is the official agency for foreign visitors something like the INS. The instructions warned me to bring my passport, 2 passport photos, my contract with the university, proof of insurance, and €60 in cash to pay the fee. I also had to bring the application all filled out.

I forgot totally about the fee until I reached the building, a grungy office building in what may be one of the bleakest parts of Berlin. Happily I had €60 in my wallet (I carry far more cash in Germany than I would in the US, since theft is illegal here). I was a bit worried about what they might accept as proof of insurance, but didn't think that the whole business would last more than half an hour.

I went into the appointment promptly, and almost the first thing the man said was: you have been working here illegally. You came in on your US passport, which means you have only a tourist visa. That is illegal and you can be punished. I explained that I had asked the University whether I needed a work permit and they explicitly said no. In that case, he said, the University is also punishable. I told him to talk to the head of personnel. He took my passport and my work contract and said to wait in the waiting room, where I was almost the only white person. I felt right at home, just as if I were back in Chicago.

Happily I had my computer with me, so I searched for the email where the personnel staff said explicitly that I did not need a work permit. When I found it, I went back and showed him. He had not managed to get through to the head of personnel, but the email gave him reason to pause. He decided that he would provide me with a work permit for the future and he would just "forget" about my working illegally, which I took to be a face-saving measure and thanked him politely.

In the end getting it all processed took about an hour and a half, and by the end he was quite nice, even giving me his card and saying to call if I had questions. I have never dealt with the INS in the US, but I think the equivalent would have been a lot more stressful.

100 minute clock

Some days accomplishments are measured in small steps. The "house master" for our building (and some others) came by today to install a doorstop to prevent my big wooden door from bumping against my big wooden bookshelves when people opened it too fast. I had a meeting at 9:30 and thought he would probably still be working when it started, but he was remarkably efficient and was gone before anyone arrived.

He (or someone) also later installed the "100 minute" clock that the students gave me yesterday. It is a regular clock, but with more divisions in the circle so that the quarter hour reads "25", the half hour reads "50", and the 3/4 hour reads "75". The students said that I would need the extra time, and they were absolutely right.

A festive day

Today was the day when the Institute planned to celebrate the retirement of my predecessor and to welcome me. The festivities began a bit early, however, when I arrived to find that all of the furniture had vanished from my office because my new furniture was supposed to arrive. I took the liberty of taking over a friend's office, and my new furniture did indeed arrive mid-morning, followed by a technician to install it and to give me a new training session on my very high tech desk chair (some chairs are really more complicated than computers). The new furniture really is quite beautiful. The wood is cherry. The new chairs for my conference table have not come yet, however. Those in the picture are still the old ones.

The celebration had a standingroom only crowd in the eveing. Everyone who spoke used notes or a prepared speech -- except me. They also all stood behind a table that served as a podium. I sat on the table. But I explained that I was an American and did that sort of thing, and that I had three points to make in increasing order of importance. The first was about teaching and reasearch and the balance between practical professional knowledge and the need to provide a solid social science base. The second was about students and how the Institute needed to make an effort to find them jobs. The third and most important, I said, was the toilets. This brought a good laugh, because the toilets in the building are really a problem. I explained that the VP for the the physical plant had promised to do something about the toilets. Everyone clapped. So my real fame, I continued, would not be as the new "W3" Professor (the top rank in Germany), but as the "WC" Professor. The response was splendid!

Life in the Office

Actually life in the office is not much different in Germany than in the US. I wander in between 9:00 and 9:30, just as at MSU, an leave between 5:30 and 6:00. My secretary keeps somewhat earlier hours, and has an hour-long commute, because she lives some distance on the east side of the city (and the city is large).

I often go to the student cafeteria for a light lunch of bread and cheese, or occasionally soup. Many faculty think the cafeteria is too crowded now that the semester is well and truly underway. I had to share a table with some students today and suffered no apparent contamination. I read my book. They studied theirs.

Duane (from MSU Libraries for those who don't know him) asked for a picture from my office window. Actually I have three windows, but two look out onto the construction at the State Library. The view will be splendid when all the work is done.

Virtual suburbs

The tree-lined street with cars parked in front of free-standing houses with big lawns and long driveways -- it could be East Lansing or almost any US suburb, but I am describing Zehlendorf in Berlin. Berlin is big. It has high rise districts, districts with apartment buildings of 5 to 10 stories, districts with long, massive, Soviet-era apartment blocks, and it has areas like Zehlendorf, which was in the old US sector. Perhaps that is why it looks so American.

Or does it? The initial image is a bit deceptive. The houses have a slightly different look to them. The architecture tends to be more solid and massive, not the socalled "baloon" frame US standard that is more or less a wooden tent with occasional bursts of decorative brick siding, but fundamentally cardboard (called plasterboard) within.

Our apartment in East Lansing has a fire detector and a sprinkler in every room. I have yet to see either in Germany, perhaps because the post-war building codes make it hard for fires to spread. Almost every internal wall would count as a firewall in the US. Perhaps that is what comes from being fire-bombed repeatedly during the war.

Old locks

I looked at yet more apartments today -- this business of looking for a place to live takes a lot of time. Today's set included one plain but nice building in a great location near restaurants, cafes, and transit. Its main drawback is that all of the windows look southwest, which could make it a bit warm in the summer with no cross-breeze. Lovely balcony, though.

The second and third places were almost identical in layout, and both from the earliest years of the 20th century. When we arrived at the first one, we couldn't get the door unlocked. It had three locks. One new one at the top, and two older ones at the bottom. The lock at the absolute bottom turned out to be a deadbolt. The middle one was a latch but the key never seemed to catch. My agent tried. Another agent who had brought the keys tried. Finally a third agend with other clients showed up and used a credit card to slip the middle latch open.

The apartment had lovely pre-WWI details on the ceiling and along the walls, and genuine turn-of-the-20th-century locks, but the kitchen needed total remodeling and the bath was not far behind. The electrical wanted modernizing from the fusebox to the wall plugs, several of which were essentially extension plugs with cords tacked on the wall. Not pretty.

The lion in the picture above was on the bannester of the second apartment.

The third apartment was much like the second, but in the Tiergarten district and its locks were a bit easier to open (though not fundamentally any different). It had a modern kitchen, an OK bath, and better electrical.

I tried to persuade our agent that we did not absolutely have to have a large (100 square meter) apartment, and that we really would like to see some high rise places. I don't think he believes me. He is, after all, the expert.

Hansaviertel (the Hansa Quarter)

I went looking at another apartment today, this time in the Hansaviertel, which is in the heart of Berlin between the two commercial centers around Bahnhof Zoo in the west and Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse in the east. The buildings in this area were winners in an architectural competition in the mid-1950s. Some are by famous architects, others by the more obscure, but all are interesting and vers servicable. Most are high rises.

This picture above shows the river Spree from the bank just opposite the quarter. The building in the picture below is not really leaning. Just the photographer.


The apartment I looked at was on the 11th floor and looked north and west. It was not as large as the other apartments I looked at last week, but the space was used so extremely well that it felt big. There were two bedrooms of about equal size, but capable of having a good double bed with room to walk around. The bath was small by US standards, but does a bathroom really need to be bigger than a bedroom? There is also the possibility of a second guest bath - there was one once and the plumbing is still there for the necessary facilities, but the owner felt that one bath sufficed and wanted a little work room instead.

The location was definitely one of its best features. Grocery, drugstore, movie theater, and restaurants are all less than 5 minutes away by foot, and the elevated trains are almost literally out the back door.

One bad thing: another prospective buyer came to look as I was leaving.

Berlin is bankrupt

That is the latest news, or rather not exactly news, since Berlin has been running a deficit for ages. The city sued the federal government to make it pay the deficit, and the high court said "no way".

Berlin had some reasonable arguments. It has heavy police and other costs as the national capitol. It also has the three serious universities in the greater Berlin-Brandenburg area, all of which get many Brandenburg students who pay no tuition. When some years ago there was a vote to make Berlin part of Brandenburg, the city voted in favor and the countryside against. The latter apparently had the impression that they might end up paying for city services, and they would much rather have the city provide services to them for free.

The court argued along different lines. Berlin as a city is actually quite visibly rich. It just happens to have a "red-red" coalition (an alliance of the Social Democrats and Party of Democratic Socialism ,which is the new name for the former Communists). The coalition could sell large tracts of city owned rental housing and it could do what most other German states have done and start charging tuition. It could even raise the price of opera tickets to support the city's three opera companies. The local papers saw the court decision as more of a slap in the face for the coalition than for the city itself.

It's hard to think of Berlin as anything but well off when I cross the River Spree on the way to my office, or when walking through the main quad of the university's grand old building. It is a beautiful place and mere bankruptcy seems hardly worth worrying about. (These pictures were taken with my phone)

Professor and Director

Humboldt is a “Gremium” university. Gremium is a German word for “board” or “committee” and these committees explicitly rule the life of the university. Each Institute has a ruling committee with a prescribed number of full professors, members of a group that in the US would be considered something like assistant and associate professors, and students. The Institutsrat, as it is called, makes all of the official decisions for the Institute.

Full professors must have half of the votes, and there must be places for at least four on the committee. The Institute has only four full professors, including me, but through a bizarre set of rules (so bizarre that they might be changed to accommodate a new vice-president), I cannot be elected to the Institutsrat until February 2008, even though there is a vacant position that no one except me can fill.

The rules do not, however, prevent the election of a director who is not a member of the Institutsrat, even though the director chairs the meetings. This allowed the Institutsrat to elect me as the new Director this afternoon with only one negative vote from a person, who (with some reason) objected to my inexperience with the Institute and its practices.

Happily the professor who has served as director during the interim will stay on as deputy director, and he has promised to serve as the internal director while I deal more with the Institute’s relationships with other organizations. This is a division of labor that works well in US schools. The idea is new here, but people are very willing to try it out.

classes begin

I taught my first class at a German university today, a seminar on how to evaluate digital libraries. About 20 students turned up, even though the class was not in the official course list (which was printed in July, well before I had accepted a position). Most of them came because they were curious about the new professor. Only one or two came from technical areas. Several had linguistic or foreign language backgrounds, including one student just returned from Paris.

They laughed at appropriate places in my stories, and listened earnestly when I lectured about anthropological methods. It is hard not to like students who are so beautifully cooperative and I did like them a lot. I was surprised, however, when I discovered that only two of them were taking the class for credit. That is far more common in Germany than in the US, but it meant some rethinking about student presentations for future classes.

After class I introduced the speaker at the Colloquium series, and then had to sneek out early to go to the reception the Berlin Senate held for new faculty. It was on Alte Jakub Strasse. I started down the street, thought I was going the wrong way, turned back, went further in the wrong diretction, and finally took a cab. The reception was in a modern art museum that had been a storehouse for glass in the East German era. Some of the recent sketches were quite interesting, but by the time I looked at them I had had enough wine that perhaps anything would have seemed interesting. All of the food and drink was served at standing tables, which made it easy for people to circulate. I talked with my friend and colleague Peter, a mathmatician from the Free University, a new vicepresident, and a new faculty member in the law school. All in all a pleasant evening, if perhaps one that was hard on my feet.

Ceremony to begin the Academic Year

By chance when I was out at lunch I ran into the Vice-President for Budget, Personnel, and Physical Plant, who reminded me about the ceremony for the beginning of the Academic Year, so I decided to go.

The ceremony took place in the Audi Max (the Auditorium Maxmium), the largest lecture hall in the old main building of the univesity. There was standing room only, both in the balony and on the main floor, and since I was a late-comer; I stood for almost two hours.

The event began with a chamber music concert, all strings with a harp accompaniment. Then the president gave a speech about the DFG (German Research Society, which is roughly equal to NSF and NEH together) Excellence Initiative, where Humboldt won a minor prize and Munich's two universities carried away the top honors. The president is a comparatively young man, whose own specialty is ancient history from around the time of Ambrose. He is also an excellent speaker. The audience listened intently as he exhorted both faculty and students to strive for excellence in the coming year. He also reminded listeners that top reseearch institutions like Harvard and Stanford (and how could he forget Chicago?) built their research programs on the Humboldt model. No one whispered to a neighbor. No one stirred. He set a tone for the coming year.

The next speaker was the federal Minister for Education and offered a more convential speech, that was good in its way, but not quite gripping enough to keep my young neighbors from whispering actively to each other.

Various ceremonies followed, including the presentation of awards to students. It was typically German that all of them (men and women) received a bouquet as their prize. Two students were also symbolically "matriculated" into the university, one was a woman from one of the more distance former Soviet Republics, the other was a man from Berlin. Then representatives of the student goverment spoke, followed by another concert, after which the president gave more flowers to the conductor and the solo harpist.

It all ended in a reception that was so crowded that I didn't attend. I did talk with one of the prize winners on the way out the door, though (a very long slow line). He is a young men just starting his chemistry studies. I think he was somewhat shocked to have a professor address him, but he handled himself with far more poise than one expects in a 20 year old male.

Traveling the transit

I bought a Monatskarte or "Monthly ticket" for the Berlin transit system today. There are people in Berlin who have cars and parking is less challenging than in New York or Chicago or Munich. But why park a car when elevated trains (the S-Bahn), underground trains (U-Bahn), busses and the occasional streetcar will get you anywhere you want to go without polluting the environment or costing anything like what it costs to insure a car, to say nothing of buying and fueling one.

In a way the Monatskarte was disappointing. It looks like any ordinary single-ride transit ticket, except that it has the word Monatskarte on it and the starting and ending dates. Since I am living in walking distance of my office, I didn't plan to get a card orignally, but I find I do enough transit riding even so to make it worthwhile.

And since I am riding the rails, I plan to take pictures of some of the stations to post on this blog. Not all are handsome, and many of the U-Bahn stations are, well, just holes in the ground. But some are interesting, like the one at Heerstrasse that I use to go to St. George's Anglican Church on Sundays. I took this picture with my phone, whose features I have not yet mastered.

Apartment hunting

Yesterday I looked at 4 Berlin apartments with a real estate agent, who is one of the few people I have seen here who drives a car with an automatic shift, though I think they are becomning more common.

The first place was in a rennovated older building on the 2nd floor (3rd floor US). The entry way had lovely plaster reliefs, and there was turn-of-the-century detail on many of the doors. The apartment had interestingly irregularly shaped rooms, a pleasant balcony, and high ceilings, except in the hallway, where the previous owners had build an ugly low ceiling with a storage area above it. The kitchen had also been stripped of every cupboard and appliance. Only the sink remained, and a very aged sink at that. The bathroom also had a window that opened to the kitchen. On reflection I can imagine that the mix of smells might not be ideal.

The second place was a 5th floor walk-up apartment with two levels inside. We would be very healthy if we bought it, but I can also imagine the stairs being a burden in 20 years when we are in our mid 70s. The kitchen was good, complete with stone countertops, which I like. The internal second story was a bit like the upper part of some US Cape Cod houses: very open.

The third place was a handsome le Corbusier building.

One balcony looks out toward Berlin, the other looks west and more or less over the Grünewald (which is more south than west). The whole area is protected as a reserve, so nothing can spoil the view. The inside of the apartment is unusual. Basically there is a hall only every two floors and most apartments are two story inside. You enter this one in the small space, which is the kitchen (totally modern and wonderful) and the dining room, whose view is to the east over Berlin. Downstairs is the bedroom with a balcony facing east. It is not enormous, but has plenty of room for a big double bed. There are built in bookshelves, build in drawers, build-in walk-in closets (along the hall), and lovely bathroom, a wide hall, and at the other end a generous living room with more build-in shelves and a balcony facing west. The doors all slide, and they are not like US sliding doors- When closed, they look like walls.

Negatives: it is out at Olympia Stadium where drunk football (ie soccer) players roam, and the long long hallway wastes space (or would if so much were not turned into storage). Positives: The building had all the infrastructure redone a few years ago and the apartment is pristine beyond belief. Everything is top quality and furniture needs would be limited because of all the built-in stuff. The owner remodeled with the intent to make the apartment fit the style of the building, but I think he may have improved on it. It has an elevator. There is a little store in the building that sells Brötchen, eggs, etc. The S-Bahn is only 5 minutes away, with a driect train to the stop near the university. The trip takes about 22 minutes and trains run about every 10 minutes.

The last place was a roof-top apartment in a building still being rennovated. It will have an elevator, which is good. Trouble is, the work was so incomplete that there were not even walls up. A similar model apartment was not open when we were there.

Soup Kitchen

Not quite a soup kitchen in the sense of a place where poor people go for something to eat. This was a moderately pricy soup kitchen just steps off of the fashionable Friedrichstrasse shopping street. My friend Peter suggested that we go there for a quick lunch. He had a large bowl of "anti-flu" soup, which was essentially chicken soup, and I had a small but entirely adequate bowl of "ayervedic" soup with curry and many nice vegetables. Peter's cost 4.40 € (a little over $5), mine cost half as much. Bread came with it too, of course.

The restaurant had two or three standing tables inside. These are literally tables where you stand while eating your food. They are very practical, since a much larger number of people can stand at a table than can pull up chairs, and most of the people eating there had spend the day sitting anyway. We ate at one of the outdoor tables, since the weather was so beautifully mild. I understand it was snowing in East Lansing.

at a research meeting

I was invited to a research meeting at another institute today, and was very interested to see the social dynamics. One of the customs was for everone to make the rounds of those already arrived to shake their hands. The meeting also had coffee and tea waiting in thermos jugs, with real china cups and saucers, and also mineral water with real glasses.

The content of the meeting ran like any ordinary meeting in the US, with a few people speaking regularly, and some others only intermittently or not at all. Only two women were present, but this was a strongly computing-related topic so the numbers might not have been very different in the US.

Two men wore suits (I was one, only because I can't find my sewing kit to fix the button that fell off of my blue blazer), three others had on suit jackets. Only one tie was present (and not on one of the suit wearers -- we both had open shirts). All the other men were in jeans or other informal trousers, and wore polo or other open shirts.

The women naturally dressed somethwhat better. The younger woman (who has a prestigeous but time-limited "jounior professorship" ) wore a jacket and jeans, the other slightly older woman (mid thirties?) had a pretty scarf that she fiddled with constantly. The average age in the room was probably late 40s, early 50s.

Oddly enough the grant proposal they were working on was in English. I learned afterwards that it was in English because this particular competition involved such a broad range of German academics that none remained to give a impartial judgment, so the DFG (German Research Society) decided to require proposals to be in English to be able to attract outside reviewers.

Learning Moodle

Moodle is an open source course management system. Humboldt has chosen it as their preferred platform and is encouraging all faculty to put their courses into it. Since I had experience with Angel at Michigan State, learning to use Moodle does not seem hard.

What was especially interesting was to watch how the faculty (those who came to the training anyway) reacted as students learning what was for some a complex online system. No one actually asked any public questions, and no one seemed to expect any. But it was a hands-on presentation and the young man from the computer center who did most of the teaching went around from person to person to give individual help.

The training was scheduled for an hour and a half and ended promptly.

Greeting the New Students

I volunteered to greet the new BA students in the name of the faculty. Many were women, which is not surprising in a class of library students. There were perhaps 50 or 60 all totaled. Not all were young. In fact, they looked very much like a class of students that one might see in any US college, except that they were overwhelmingly white and middle class, so perhaps really more like any 1950 US college. They were definitely not 1950s students, though. No suits or dresses or sense of formality. I did get them to giggle a few times, but never succeeded in making them talk.

I told the story about the official tite on Antony Hopwood's business card at Oxford: “ordinary student”. And I used it to make the point that we are all students. I also encouraged them to learn from each other as much as from the faculty. I'm not sure they believed that, however.

At the end I allowed a long silence, which often gets someone to talk since crowds hate silence. I also plied them with earnest looks in the best theatrical style. One young woman in the front row moved her hand as if about to speak, but when I called on her she blushed prettily and shook her head.

German students simply are not accustomed to speaking in class. But perhaps if we can get them started talking young...

Where are all the Germans?

The S-Bahn had some maintenance going on today, so there was a complex system to shuttle-trains, one from Friedrichstrasse to Bellvue, another from Bellvue to Bahnhof Zoo, and then regular trains went on from there. It could be confusing, even if you could read the German explanations, so I was not too surprised when a dark haired young woman asked me in English how to get to Potsdam. Her English was good, but not perfect. After trying to explain where to trainsfer and seeing incomprehension creep into her eyes, I told her that I was going in that direction myself, and would tell her when to get out. She turned out to be a Hungarian medical student in Berlin for an internship and had been told that Potsdam was a sight worth seeing.

At St. George’s church I met a young Australian couple just visiting the city, and an older couple from Vancouver, Canada, who were visiting a friend of their son and his girlfriend (from Virginia). Of course St. George’s is an Anglican parish, so one ought to expect to encounter English speakers.

At supper at one of my favorite Berlin restaurants, Mommsen Eck the “House der 100 Biere” (which was there when my father was a child), I sat at one of my usual tables. The three girls at the table nearest mine turned out to be British, and the couple that sat down at the table just opposite spoke loud, clear American English. The waitresses answered all of these English speakers in equally good (if not better) English.

So where were all the Germans today? Probably enjoying the fresh air and sunshine in the Grünewald or walking around the gardens of Sans Souci. The only genuine Germans that I saw were carrying their bicycles or lacing up their hiking boots.

Frankfurt conference

I am writing this entry on the train from Frankfurt, where I spend the last several days at a conference put on by the German-North American Resources Project (GNARP). The conference took place in the former IG Farben headquarters, which has become part of the University of Frankfurt. It is an immense building that reminds me of the GM Building in Detroit. The stone facing is lighter, there are more unconventional shapes such as a rotunda entrance and the slight curve to the whole structure, but they have the same broad ratchet-like mass of wings and windows that gives space similar to a high rise without the extremes of height. The tour guide told a story about when the US army occupied the building. They planned to replace all the windows, but only measured the ones on the ground floor, since all of the windows appeared to be the same size. When the windows for the upper floors arrived, they discovered that the architect had used perspective to play an optical illusion on them. The upper windows were sized to look the same as the lower ones, not actually to be the same. None of us thought to ask what became of the thousands of pieces of glass that did not fit.

One of the conference organizers, a good friend, offered to organize all of the accommodations. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but turned out to be an immense headache for all concerned. The hotel itself was in the small town of Gelnhausen, something over half an hour by train from Frankfurt. And the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof was close to half an hour from the University building where we were meeting, depending on how well the U-bahn connections worked.

The hotel was itself 20 minutes to half an hour from the Gelnhausen train station, which meant that the trip to the conference and back again each day took nearly three hours. If the room were really nice, it might have been worthwhile, but it lacked some important amenities. For example, it had no telephone, and I am also not completely sure that there was a sheet on the mattress. The cloth beneath the standard featherbed comforter looked remarkably like a mattress cover. It was spotlessly clean, however, and I felt too tired to care. The room also had no Internet access even for a price, but who expects wireless in a place with no phone or sheet?

When I went to check out, the hotel forgot to deduct the deposit I had paid. I had been warned that this might happen and protested, so the proprietor went to the other extreme of telling me to pay nothing and he would settle it all with my conference organizer friend. Not a nice thing to do to a friend, but I could more easily arrange to pay him once I found out the true total, than persuade myself to give any money to the proprietor without a note saying “paid in full.”

First Day

Yesterday was my first real day on the job at the Institute, though I was there relatively little. I had to go to an office about half an hour (by foot) away to register my presence with the authorities. When I arrived and showed them the form I had filled out, they said that I had to go to a different office. So I went back to the Institute, only to discover that I did in fact have to register at that office too, but with a different form that required a signature from the people at the Humboldt Guest House, where I am living temporarily.

Now I am about to go off to speak at a conference in Frankfurt. Since internet connections might be problematic, this blog may not resume until Sunday.

The line to enter City Markt

I was surprised today when I went to my local grocery store (which inside Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, the local train station) and discovered a line just to get in. There were lines to get out, of course. Those are probably universal. But I had never seen a line just to enter.

After 5 minutes or so, the man at the entrance stood aside and let a group of us in. The store had emptied out enough that it was possible to manoever. Shopping carts exist, but most people just use a hand-basket, which makes it easier to get around the aisles, which are fairly narrow. Just letting people crowd in would have made shopping take even longer. The line outside made sense. And it was a new experience.

Today was a national holiday (German Reunification Day) and most stores were closed. Stores in railroad stations are always an exception.

About the flight

Passengers tend to have strong feelings against airplane tardiness, even when the reasons are purely safety related. So when a plane that is already late cannot take off for 20 minutes because the control tower "forgot" to inform their counterparts at O'Hare, tempers flare. I had time to make my connection with a fairly brisk walk. Those passengers with a scant three minutes to change concourses probably did not.

My flight from Chicago to Frankfurt was on Lufthansa, which I have not flown in decades, and the plane itself was a Boing 747, which I have not been on since the early 1990s. My seat was so far back in the plane that the backrest bumped against a bulkhead (or was it the tail cone itself?), and a woman in bright yellow "Okie" shirt had causally occupied my aisle seat in preference to her middle one so that she could sit next to her two friends in matching yellow Okie shirts who turned out to be in the wrong seats themselves. The Lufthansa personnel kindly but firmly herded these stray persons back to their assigned places.

I will not go so far as to praise Lufthansa for having good food, but it was certainly the best airline food that I have had in economy this millennium. The rolls were crisp and fresh, not soggy and hard, the Indian vegetarian entree was spiced appropriately, and the breakfast sandwich tasted as if it had been made that day, not this decade. The tea also tasted like fresh tea. After years and years of airline tea, I had persuaded myself that altitude made tea brewing impossible. Apparently it doesn't.

My plan is to keep these posting short, so that they do not become a burden to do. Suffice it to say that I arrived on time in Tegel.

More tomorrow.

On the way

Many people have suggested that I keep a blog to record my experiences as a professor at Humboldt University in Berlin. This seems like the logical time to start, sitting in the airport waiting for a United flight to Chicago for my Lufthansa connection, and of course the plane is late. Actually the website says it should have landed and the display in the terminal says that the plane is still expected to leave on time. Not too likely.