New Year 2008

This is New Year's Day, which we spent first recovering from staying up until 2:30 am the night before and then going to a concert at the Berlin Cathedral. The concert was a broadly baroque program with pieces by Bach, Vivaldi, Pachelbel, Corelli, and Albinoni. Every seat was fulled as far as we could tell. People of all ages were there, including some very small and perfectly behaved children.

It has been snowing today. We did not have a white Christmas, but it is definitely a white New Year, as the picture shows. Berlin is especially pretty with a layer of white in all the tree-tops. Cars are rare enough in the center of the city that the snow does not turn black immediately from their exhaust. Berlin has such good (and well-used) transit that cars could be banned completely, at least from the inner zone. Perhaps as environmental concerns grow, Berlin will at least follow London's example and tax cars heavily that venture inside the central core.


I had intended to update this blog with pictures of the finished kitchen as soon as the work was done, but as has so often happened in recent months, time simply got away from me. The kitchen is done, however, as the pictures show, and we have so enjoyed it, that we are neglecting our duty to patronize local restaurants. One major change in this new year is the banning of cigarettes in restaurants. This will definitely change the character of our neighborhood Croatian restaurant, which seemed especially to attract chain smokers.