Holiday Greetings

Today in Berlin we have 7 hours and 39 minutes of light (9 hours and 2 minutes if you include twilight). This is roughly equivalent to Red Deer, Alberta, halfway between Calgary and Edmonton. The temperature in Red Deer is a frigid -20 C (-4 F) while Berlin enjoys +5 C (41 F). Those who want snow for Christmas seem likely to be disappointed. The view out the window (see below) is more like spring than winter.


This year I am doing my traditional Christmas / new year letter in my much neglected blog. The last six months have been intensely busy in ways that were both pleasant and exhausting. They were exhausing partly because of travel. I spent a lot of time in airports, including Paris-Charles de Gaulle, pictured below.
This airport is famous for having the roof cave in on passengers in 2004 (see BBC for details). So far it has not collapsed on me. Theoretically all the repairs are finished, but finding one's way from one gate to another is challenging, partly because closed walkways force you to follow particular paths. If you go through the wrong door, it locks and there is no going back. And even if you would rather walk from one side of the terminal to another, you may well be forced to take a bus around the outside. Nonetheless I have never failed to make my connections on time.

Joan divides her time almost equally between Berlin and Michigan (with a bit more time in Michigan). I spend perhaps a month in the US, but no longer really have a sense of living in Michigan except for the legal residence on my drivers license. This means that I increasingly see the US with foreign eyes and am horrified at the dependence on cars, at the flimsy wood-framed housing, and at the level of violence. I think the cars horrify me the most, probably because transit in Berlin is so extremely reliable.

Nonetheless the consumer unfriendliness of German companies can be wearisome. We are switching our DSL provider from 1&1 to Deutsche Telekom, largely because 1&1 has a high-priced for-cost help line and technicians who blend arrogance with ignorance. When I asked an advisor at the Deutsche Telekom store yesterday why one of their staff had tried to call me last week (and subsequently failed to call back), he said that I was wasting my time talking with him because he had no idea and no way to find out.

When Joan is in the US, we spend a lot of time on Skype, since it allows free video and voice connections. Many computer centers want to ban Skype for a variety of security reasons. Perhaps they are right to do so, but Skype use seems to be growing anyway. One indirect consequence of free Skype is that the cost of using regular phone service to call internationally has dropped. For 4 € per month we have free calling to the US from our home phone starting 15 January. It may reduce my Skype use somewhat, but it still offers no picture.

A holiday letter would not be complete without a cat picture (below).
Annette is now 4.5 years old and seems to have been growing in the last year, though that seems hardly possible. Perhaps she is merely getting fatter.

To avoid getting fatter myself I go jogging six days a week. My usual route goes along the river Spree to the Bellevue palace, where the Bundespräsident Horst Köhler lives. Then I cross the bridge and run along the north bank in Moabit, which was infamous at one time for its jail. I cross back at the bridge near the Bundesministerium des Innerns (essentially like the US Justice Department) and wend my way via Claudiusstr to our back door. It is something over 2 KM, about a mile and a quarter. On teaching days, I shorten the route a bit. Joan gets her exercise with long walks and as a result has seen far more of Berlin than I have.

We are remaining at home in Berlin this holiday season and wish all of you who read this blog a merry Christmas and happy new year. Perhaps in the new year I will even keep up this blog more reliably.