I was down at Potsdammer Platz Friday night with Robbie, some other students from the Berlin program, and a few of their visiting friends, watching the Olympic opening ceremonies on the JumboTron they’ve got in the Sony Center. The show was pretty cool, and only one person gave us trouble about cheering for the American team (as if the divers and the high jumpers had just come back from personally bombing). Anyway, it finished a little after 11 Berlin time, and people were getting ready to go their separate ways, and I wanted a snack before I took off. I knew there was a Dunkin Donuts on the main street just outside the courtyard we were sitting in, so I wandered over there for a late night glazed chocolate treat. Now this particular donut establishment was a franchise of a big, multinational company, was situated right in the middle of one of the city centers, in a city where going out until after sunrise is de rigueur no less, and that even had an internet café on the second floor. And the Dunkin Donuts chain, as those of you familiar with it will know, is particularly proud of its coffee, a drink that tired people use to stay awake. So it didn’t even occur to me to doubt that the place would be open. It’s exactly the kind of store a reasonable person would expect to see open 24/7, closing only on Sundays and the occasional holiday. But no. This centrally-located, coffee-hawking, internet-service-providing junk food outlet had not a single donut to sell at 11:30 on a Friday. There were none forthcoming, either, so it wasn’t like I’d caught the tail end of a Donut Run, where everyone stampedes to withdraw their savings in the form of pastry before the currency collapses.
This was dumbfounding, and launched an immediate discussion about German late-night eating behavior. Did any of those club-hopping twentysomethings ever get hungry or stop for a midnight snack? And if not, where did they get their energy from? Can they absorb it like plants from flashing disco lights, or perhaps convert the sonic poundings of their curious electronic music into life-giving carbohydrates? What do they do at four in the morning when they’ve been up all night an have a craving for a J-Box chicken sandwich? There’s no dollar menu to be found. These revelations were so deep and startling, I despaired that I would ever be able to explain them in my two remaining weeks in the country. Such a prophecy of failure would be self-fulfilling, and I chastened myself for my lack of faith and resolved to redouble my efforts. I would get to the bottom of this mystery.
Monday, August 16, 2004
Naked Sports on TV
This being Europe, they approach nudity on TV from a slightly different angle. The rules seem to be that the sort of thing that would furnish an R rating stateside, the occasional exposed breast or snippet of explicit dialog, is perfectly okay any time of day. No big deal. But then at midnight, it’s like some switch flips, and the channels, including he major networks, suddenly light up with soft-core pornography. All of the ads switch too, now promoting various intersections of the libido and wireless telephone service. In addition to the standard phone-sex come-ons, you see ads for pornographic background pictures for color cell phones (both of real women and of Japanese cartoon teenagers) and, most bizarrely, phone-text-message-sex hotlines. Now I can understand how smoldering love letters from the Victorian era could be quite erotic, but I feel certain that punching out “what r u wearing” on a touch-tone dial pad has to be missing a certain je ne se quoi. “9 44 2 8 …” just doesn’t do it for me, anyway.
One of the nudity-presenting pretenses Robbie and I stumbled upon was a special, no doubt inspired by the original Olympics, about nude sports competitions. The show ranked these in a top-10 countdown, according to some metric that wasn’t entirely clear but that did seem to correlate fairly strongly with the attractiveness of the competitors. This meant that the show actually got worse as it went on. Naked surfing and marathon running, visual aesthetics aside, really just don’t make for compelling television. But the program opened with fat old nudists vacuuming the living room or barbequing in their backyards in the buff. Indoors, the camera shot from down low, turning the participants into blobby pinkish giants shoving around enormous roaring obelisks of black and beige plastic. It was easily a strong contender for the funnies half-minute of television ever produced.
One of the nudity-presenting pretenses Robbie and I stumbled upon was a special, no doubt inspired by the original Olympics, about nude sports competitions. The show ranked these in a top-10 countdown, according to some metric that wasn’t entirely clear but that did seem to correlate fairly strongly with the attractiveness of the competitors. This meant that the show actually got worse as it went on. Naked surfing and marathon running, visual aesthetics aside, really just don’t make for compelling television. But the program opened with fat old nudists vacuuming the living room or barbequing in their backyards in the buff. Indoors, the camera shot from down low, turning the participants into blobby pinkish giants shoving around enormous roaring obelisks of black and beige plastic. It was easily a strong contender for the funnies half-minute of television ever produced.
Lie to the Dirty Foreigners
A low-intensity political argument broke out when few of us got together Monday night for dinner at a Cuban restaurant to celebrate somebody’s birthday. A pair of conservative (for Stanford) students were trying to delicately argue that one could conceivably disagree that the president was the root of all evil even without being wholly and unreachably evil oneself. This can be tricky to do. Anyway, at one point I was telling one of them, Malcolm, how I thought the Bush administration handled international affairs with a lack of tact and nuance that bordered on recklessness. Another student brought up the Kyoto Protocol, and Malcolm objected that the agreement was never going to be ratified in the Senate, which was true. Are we supposed to simply pretend that we’re okay with it, he asked, to act like we’re just dragging our feet or haggling over details when in fact there’s no way we’re ever going to ratify? Isn’t it better to just say up front what we think? I had an epiphany. No, no it wasn’t better. I want a president who will lie to foreigners, who has the patience and the presence of mind to play the little games of diplomacy, so that when the rubber hits the track and we need to get things done, we’re more likely to get our way.
Bill Clinton was the guest on the last episode of the Daily Show’s international edition (which we only just discovered). I was listening to him talk about his terms in office and the war in Iraq and the upcoming election, and I was nodding along – everything he said was just so right! I caught myself; Slick Willie was just working his usual charismagic, and I had been completely caught up in it. Then I smiled fondly. That’s the kind of man I want to send to deal with France.
Bill Clinton was the guest on the last episode of the Daily Show’s international edition (which we only just discovered). I was listening to him talk about his terms in office and the war in Iraq and the upcoming election, and I was nodding along – everything he said was just so right! I caught myself; Slick Willie was just working his usual charismagic, and I had been completely caught up in it. Then I smiled fondly. That’s the kind of man I want to send to deal with France.
Monday, August 09, 2004
Fifth Letter from Berlin
I wasn’t planning on writing any more of these things, if for no other reason than because I wanted to still have a few stories to tell when I got home. But then Mike e-mailed me today. He works more hours a day than I do in a week, and apparently my scribblings are one of his few sources of joy in the world, so I guess I’ll help a brother out. You have my permission to thank, or to blame, him for this week’s update.
First of all: it’s official. We three are the Voodoo Tenants, a trio of accursed real estate customers who bring naught but misfortune and entropy to wherever we lodge. Last weekend I was reading on a sofa in the living room when I began to hear a pang, pang, pang dripping noise coming from the kitchen. I walked over and looked in the sink, but the tap was solidly off. Suddenly, a milky water droplet whistled by my left eye. I looked up, to see water dripping down from the ceiling, streaking the molding along the top of the wall and pattering down around me. Soon, the wall began to bulge and bubble, and then to split at seams in the wallpaper and sluice out great splashing waves of black water. It was some real Exorcist shit. Turns out the people who rent the flat above ours were replacing their washing machine. Unfortunately, the water shutoff valve in the wall didn’t actually turn the water off, so when they took the hose off the wall, the plumbing started pumping water through a three-quarter in pipe onto their bathroom floor at a gallon a minute. Also, this was the hot water line, meaning it came out at a healthy 180 degrees F, and the family couldn’t try to plug the leak without scalding themselves. Then the Hausmeister, or building manager, was drunk and didn’t quite remember where the main shutoff for the building’s plumbing was, so we wound up repeatedly mopping up the floor and dumping the results out the window for around an hour. We’re not liable for damages (duh), but it’s still scary to see the walls start bleeding on you.
I have found places in Germany to buy books in English, so now I’m putting my commutes to good work and burning through paperbacks like a German Shepard through bratwursts. I read The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, who told me a lot of things I already knew about human nature, but also told me what research had been done to prove it. I read Atlas Shrugged, where Ayn Rand says that everyone who’s not a libertarian lassiez-faire capitalist is a nihilistic death cultist. I read this clever little book told first-person by an autistic kid in England. I read Cryptonomicon, which was so good I went out and bought other stuff by Neal Stevenson, Snow Crash and Quicksilver. Snow Crash is great fun and would make a really badass movie – it’s sci-fi not in a ‘this is how the world will be in 20 years’ way but in a “let’s dream up a crazy cartoon future, because that will be more fun” kind of way. The main character is named Hiro Protagonist, a hacker/concert promoter/pizza delivery boy for the Mafia whose business card announces him as the “Greatest Swordfighter in the World.” Yesterday afternoon, I read Fight Club, which is just like the movie, but with a creepier ending.
Speaking of Fight Club, I went out to a party at somebody’s apartment on Friday and got into this huge, sprawling argument with this smirky German guy (no, I did not kick his ass. The Fight Club connection comes later). We started off friendly; he sat down at an empty seat across the table in the kitchen where I was hanging out, and I introduced myself and we shook hands and he asked me if I had any cigarette papers. We talked a bit about what we were doing and I talked about my job and how it would be really interesting if I still was interested in natural language processing, but that instead I’d recently decided to go to law school. Ah, he smirked, then you will be miserable your whole life. I started to explain how perhaps many people would, but that I actually enjoy he process of working though subtle logical arguments, and that I don’t love money enough to kill myself working 60+ hours a week, but by then he was already off and running, trying to explain to me how the American legal system is irreparably unjust, corrupt, and just generally bad.
Europeans are always doing this: trying to tell you things you don’t know about your own country, because you live there and haven’t had a chance to read this really insightful book by this one guy whose name they can’t remember and whose references never even existed. At first I did the little bit I always do at this point, sweeping my arms wide to encompass the whole room and all the space beyond, putting on a warm smile and telling him, “Welcome to planet Earth. We are the species Homo Sapiens, or humans for short, and this is what we do.” But he persisted, calling the American legal system one of the worst in the world, nay, one of the worst ever. Top twenty. Some perspective was needed here. I tried explaining how the United States, though far from perfect, could be a whole lot worse before it even began to approach the level of the vast majority of most systems of law in world history, which tend to go something like, “we’re the biggest guys around, and we’ve got swords, so just give us what we want and maybe we won’t hurt everybody.” But no. Because in Fight Club, the character played by Edward Norton makes cynical calculations about automotive recalls without considering the cost of human life. And because people could sue McDonalds for millions of dollars for spilling hot coffee on themselves. And because there really was no social mobility in America, because descendants of indentured servants from the seventeenth century were still poor today, and did you know that indentured servitude was actually worse than slavery, according to this book I read by this guy whose name I don’t remember… and so on. All of the previous examples are real, and not hyperboles I’ve dreamed up for comic effect.
Actually, one major difference here was that I was familiar with nearly all of the relevant data. I kept saying things like, “actually, according to the 2000 census, fully half of the Americans in the lowest quintile of income earners in 1990 had left it” “no, the firebombing of Tokyo was in fact a far more deadly attack,” and “Well, according to the National Institutes of Health..” and so on. He held that genetics research that did long-term studies of twins was both immoral in inaccurate, because the Nazis were also interested in twins, and that statistics were just clever ways to disguise the truth, could never convey real information about the world. I pointed out that the Nazis were also interested in cars and airplanes, and that these seemed to work fine, and that the Oakland A’s general manager had made clever use of statistics to take a small-market team deep into the playoffs for years, but he was of a Platonic bent, and appeals to reality did little to mollify him. I had some more beer.
First of all: it’s official. We three are the Voodoo Tenants, a trio of accursed real estate customers who bring naught but misfortune and entropy to wherever we lodge. Last weekend I was reading on a sofa in the living room when I began to hear a pang, pang, pang dripping noise coming from the kitchen. I walked over and looked in the sink, but the tap was solidly off. Suddenly, a milky water droplet whistled by my left eye. I looked up, to see water dripping down from the ceiling, streaking the molding along the top of the wall and pattering down around me. Soon, the wall began to bulge and bubble, and then to split at seams in the wallpaper and sluice out great splashing waves of black water. It was some real Exorcist shit. Turns out the people who rent the flat above ours were replacing their washing machine. Unfortunately, the water shutoff valve in the wall didn’t actually turn the water off, so when they took the hose off the wall, the plumbing started pumping water through a three-quarter in pipe onto their bathroom floor at a gallon a minute. Also, this was the hot water line, meaning it came out at a healthy 180 degrees F, and the family couldn’t try to plug the leak without scalding themselves. Then the Hausmeister, or building manager, was drunk and didn’t quite remember where the main shutoff for the building’s plumbing was, so we wound up repeatedly mopping up the floor and dumping the results out the window for around an hour. We’re not liable for damages (duh), but it’s still scary to see the walls start bleeding on you.
I have found places in Germany to buy books in English, so now I’m putting my commutes to good work and burning through paperbacks like a German Shepard through bratwursts. I read The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, who told me a lot of things I already knew about human nature, but also told me what research had been done to prove it. I read Atlas Shrugged, where Ayn Rand says that everyone who’s not a libertarian lassiez-faire capitalist is a nihilistic death cultist. I read this clever little book told first-person by an autistic kid in England. I read Cryptonomicon, which was so good I went out and bought other stuff by Neal Stevenson, Snow Crash and Quicksilver. Snow Crash is great fun and would make a really badass movie – it’s sci-fi not in a ‘this is how the world will be in 20 years’ way but in a “let’s dream up a crazy cartoon future, because that will be more fun” kind of way. The main character is named Hiro Protagonist, a hacker/concert promoter/pizza delivery boy for the Mafia whose business card announces him as the “Greatest Swordfighter in the World.” Yesterday afternoon, I read Fight Club, which is just like the movie, but with a creepier ending.
Speaking of Fight Club, I went out to a party at somebody’s apartment on Friday and got into this huge, sprawling argument with this smirky German guy (no, I did not kick his ass. The Fight Club connection comes later). We started off friendly; he sat down at an empty seat across the table in the kitchen where I was hanging out, and I introduced myself and we shook hands and he asked me if I had any cigarette papers. We talked a bit about what we were doing and I talked about my job and how it would be really interesting if I still was interested in natural language processing, but that instead I’d recently decided to go to law school. Ah, he smirked, then you will be miserable your whole life. I started to explain how perhaps many people would, but that I actually enjoy he process of working though subtle logical arguments, and that I don’t love money enough to kill myself working 60+ hours a week, but by then he was already off and running, trying to explain to me how the American legal system is irreparably unjust, corrupt, and just generally bad.
Europeans are always doing this: trying to tell you things you don’t know about your own country, because you live there and haven’t had a chance to read this really insightful book by this one guy whose name they can’t remember and whose references never even existed. At first I did the little bit I always do at this point, sweeping my arms wide to encompass the whole room and all the space beyond, putting on a warm smile and telling him, “Welcome to planet Earth. We are the species Homo Sapiens, or humans for short, and this is what we do.” But he persisted, calling the American legal system one of the worst in the world, nay, one of the worst ever. Top twenty. Some perspective was needed here. I tried explaining how the United States, though far from perfect, could be a whole lot worse before it even began to approach the level of the vast majority of most systems of law in world history, which tend to go something like, “we’re the biggest guys around, and we’ve got swords, so just give us what we want and maybe we won’t hurt everybody.” But no. Because in Fight Club, the character played by Edward Norton makes cynical calculations about automotive recalls without considering the cost of human life. And because people could sue McDonalds for millions of dollars for spilling hot coffee on themselves. And because there really was no social mobility in America, because descendants of indentured servants from the seventeenth century were still poor today, and did you know that indentured servitude was actually worse than slavery, according to this book I read by this guy whose name I don’t remember… and so on. All of the previous examples are real, and not hyperboles I’ve dreamed up for comic effect.
Actually, one major difference here was that I was familiar with nearly all of the relevant data. I kept saying things like, “actually, according to the 2000 census, fully half of the Americans in the lowest quintile of income earners in 1990 had left it” “no, the firebombing of Tokyo was in fact a far more deadly attack,” and “Well, according to the National Institutes of Health..” and so on. He held that genetics research that did long-term studies of twins was both immoral in inaccurate, because the Nazis were also interested in twins, and that statistics were just clever ways to disguise the truth, could never convey real information about the world. I pointed out that the Nazis were also interested in cars and airplanes, and that these seemed to work fine, and that the Oakland A’s general manager had made clever use of statistics to take a small-market team deep into the playoffs for years, but he was of a Platonic bent, and appeals to reality did little to mollify him. I had some more beer.
Friday, June 25, 2004
Fourth Letter from Berlin
This has taken much longer to write than I intended; well over a month at this point. As a result, the letter itself is also much longer than originally planned. I hope you all made through finals alright, and are enjoying summer. I’m living in a fabulous apartment for the next two months with two guys from the Stanford program, and so far all that we’ve done this week when we get home from work is sit around and watch soccer. ‘We’ in this case is myself and Robbie Kittleson, since our third roommate James Olunga is still visiting his family back in Kenya. You probably know someone who knows one of them (check thefacebook to find out who), and I’m sure they’ll tell you they’re both great guys. I’ll put some pictures up on my web space as soon as I figure out how to. I’m locked away from the campus broadband at the Stanford center, and dial-up at home is not cooperating.
Anyway, as is custom with Stanford students, my quarter ended in a deluge of work. We took about a field trip a week, meaning we did no work and got little sleep, only to find that when we returned we had to have make-up classes, as if these weren’t planned months in advance but were snow days or something. Then in the middle of finals I went out to this conference on globalization that kids from each of the overseas programs went to. It was held in Berlin, so at least I didn’t have a 20 hour flight like the poor saps from Kyoto and Santiago. Our group discussions were pretty wishy-washy, but I spent two of the three nights out until the trains start running again at 5 am, so that was fun. But I should note that one is often ill-prepared to discuss the dynamics of international economics when one is running on about two hours of sleep. The only stuff I could reliably stay awake for was when (Stanford IR prof) Stephen Krasner was talking, because he’s the most awesome humanities professor alive. Otherwise, naptime. Then as soon as the conference was over, I had to write the final paper for my crazy sports class.
This was the course that had me writing out an agonizing two pages of sociological analysis in German every week, but the final was an open-ended question, and we were to answer it in English. Clearly, this was my opportunity for vengeance. After muddling through a full quarter of academic work auf Deutsch, I would write an essay of crippling opacity. I slapped on my headphones and cranked up a recording of a concert Ben Harper played in Berlin, cranking out unintelligible academic-speak while jamming to Voodoo Child. I recast the topic question on my terms, and then half-answered it with an equivocating, back-to-front thesis, “The much more interesting and relevant question is whether the experience of sports in Germany can reveal something heretofore unknown about and yet unique to that character. Ironically, the most exceptional aspect of contemporary German society is a rejection of German exceptionalism, a deep and thorough longing to be an “ordinary” country, just one nation among many others in a variety of international groupings and shared identities.” I broke out the weapons-grade vocabulary and pressed into service every idiom, aphorism, and allusion I could lay hold of, in an effort to browbeat and intimidate my audience. I wrote sentences like, “If we were sloppy in our treatment of causality, we even could easily conclude that every minute peculiarity of German sporting behavior reflects some indelible aspect of the Teutonic character.” It was glorious. It must have worked, too, since I would up doing much better in the class than my grades on the weekly papers would have warranted.
A few days after the quarter ended, my family started an epic tour of Deutschland, and I spent a week touring southern Germany with my parents and grandparents, eating hearty Bavarian meals and looking at castles. My mom planned the whole thing with this travel book she has from a guy named Rick Steeves, and she treated it like we were working on our Germany merit badges, with a solid list of requirements that had to be checked off like GER’s before they left the country. “Okay, we’ve ridden a boat down the Rhine, so that’ll count for the 7c and taker up one of our required above-100 elective slots…” But she was pretty good about not overprogamming the days, and my only real problem is that quaint German bed-and-breakfasts, or Pensions, have quaint little beds with quaint little footboards. This is all very charming unless you happen to be, say, 6’4”, when it just means you can’t fit onto the bed without curling into a ball like a cold puppy. That’s fine for a day or two, and then you’ve had enough of medieval towns, and want to get back into buildings that were made after people became a bit more normal-sized. Our apartment, for example, has 12-foot ceilings.
This past week has been great. Every day, I just come home from work on the train, cook myself some food, and then plop down to watch the European soccer championships. I have learned, however, that Robbie and I are in dire need of a cookbook. Two nights ago after I finished cooking myself some pasta and a sausage, I went to put the ingredients away, only to find in the refrigerator and the cupboard an identical packet of pasta, a jar of the same brand pasta sauce, and a package of exactly the same Wurst I’d just fried up for myself. Neither of us, it seems has any imagination. So yesterday we met some friends for dinner and watched the England-Portugal game in Potsdammer Platz on a giant outdoor screen. The Trojan horse is long gone, but now there’s a hundred-foot inflatable Spider-Man climbing one of the buildings.
The game was ridiculous, 1-0 from the third minute until there was only five left on the clock, when the Portuguese scored on a rocket that bounced off the crossbar. Both teams scored with only minutes to play in the second overtime period, forcing a shootout. I should mention at this point that David Beckham is worthless. I’ve seen him play in four matches, with no goals, no assists, and two missed penalty kicks. Leading off for England in the shootout, the most famous athlete in the world missed the goal. The shootout tied at 4-4 (thanks, Becks), and went into two extra innings until the Portuguese goalie made a lucky save for the win. On the upside, I have a new favorite soccer player in the entire world, and English defender named Ashleigh Cole. First off, he’s named Ashleigh, which is pretty awesome if you can pull it off. Second, he absolutely shut down the entire left-hand side of the field. Time and again, Portugal’s flashy young starlet would come dancing down the field, feinting, bobbing, and weaving, his hair immaculate and his ears studded with bling that would make Barry Bonds blush, only to have a steely-eyed Cole kick the ball right out from under him. And when the shootout was tied 4-4 after the five regular kickers and the teams had to go down the rosters for shooters, did Cole score? Yes he did. Take that, Mr. Posh Spice.
Anyway, the little guidebook that my mom has says in the introduction that “Travel makes it impossible to be ethnocentric.” This is nonsense. If anything, absence makes the heart grow fonder. I’ve taken to saying ‘howdy’ and ‘y’all,’ just because I’m an American, dammit. I watch world-class soccer every day, but a little part of me is grousing about how much more boring it is than basketball. If I had a cowboy hat, I think I’d wear it, silly as that would look with shorts and sandals. Maybe it’s because the language is so confounding, or maybe it’s just that I haven’t had a decent burrito in four months, but I feel much more American here than I ever did at home, in actual America. So I’m still having a good time, especially since the quarter is over, but I’m really looking forwards to getting back home. Plus our place in suites next fall will be awesome, I’ll get to take water polo again, and all my classes will be in that most beautiful of modes of human communication, ye olde English language.
If any of you will be in Germany between now and the end of August, or in San Diego in September before school, give a holler, and otherwise I’ll see you back on campus. And let me know how your summer’s going – I love to get mail that I can actually read.
Anyway, as is custom with Stanford students, my quarter ended in a deluge of work. We took about a field trip a week, meaning we did no work and got little sleep, only to find that when we returned we had to have make-up classes, as if these weren’t planned months in advance but were snow days or something. Then in the middle of finals I went out to this conference on globalization that kids from each of the overseas programs went to. It was held in Berlin, so at least I didn’t have a 20 hour flight like the poor saps from Kyoto and Santiago. Our group discussions were pretty wishy-washy, but I spent two of the three nights out until the trains start running again at 5 am, so that was fun. But I should note that one is often ill-prepared to discuss the dynamics of international economics when one is running on about two hours of sleep. The only stuff I could reliably stay awake for was when (Stanford IR prof) Stephen Krasner was talking, because he’s the most awesome humanities professor alive. Otherwise, naptime. Then as soon as the conference was over, I had to write the final paper for my crazy sports class.
This was the course that had me writing out an agonizing two pages of sociological analysis in German every week, but the final was an open-ended question, and we were to answer it in English. Clearly, this was my opportunity for vengeance. After muddling through a full quarter of academic work auf Deutsch, I would write an essay of crippling opacity. I slapped on my headphones and cranked up a recording of a concert Ben Harper played in Berlin, cranking out unintelligible academic-speak while jamming to Voodoo Child. I recast the topic question on my terms, and then half-answered it with an equivocating, back-to-front thesis, “The much more interesting and relevant question is whether the experience of sports in Germany can reveal something heretofore unknown about and yet unique to that character. Ironically, the most exceptional aspect of contemporary German society is a rejection of German exceptionalism, a deep and thorough longing to be an “ordinary” country, just one nation among many others in a variety of international groupings and shared identities.” I broke out the weapons-grade vocabulary and pressed into service every idiom, aphorism, and allusion I could lay hold of, in an effort to browbeat and intimidate my audience. I wrote sentences like, “If we were sloppy in our treatment of causality, we even could easily conclude that every minute peculiarity of German sporting behavior reflects some indelible aspect of the Teutonic character.” It was glorious. It must have worked, too, since I would up doing much better in the class than my grades on the weekly papers would have warranted.
A few days after the quarter ended, my family started an epic tour of Deutschland, and I spent a week touring southern Germany with my parents and grandparents, eating hearty Bavarian meals and looking at castles. My mom planned the whole thing with this travel book she has from a guy named Rick Steeves, and she treated it like we were working on our Germany merit badges, with a solid list of requirements that had to be checked off like GER’s before they left the country. “Okay, we’ve ridden a boat down the Rhine, so that’ll count for the 7c and taker up one of our required above-100 elective slots…” But she was pretty good about not overprogamming the days, and my only real problem is that quaint German bed-and-breakfasts, or Pensions, have quaint little beds with quaint little footboards. This is all very charming unless you happen to be, say, 6’4”, when it just means you can’t fit onto the bed without curling into a ball like a cold puppy. That’s fine for a day or two, and then you’ve had enough of medieval towns, and want to get back into buildings that were made after people became a bit more normal-sized. Our apartment, for example, has 12-foot ceilings.
This past week has been great. Every day, I just come home from work on the train, cook myself some food, and then plop down to watch the European soccer championships. I have learned, however, that Robbie and I are in dire need of a cookbook. Two nights ago after I finished cooking myself some pasta and a sausage, I went to put the ingredients away, only to find in the refrigerator and the cupboard an identical packet of pasta, a jar of the same brand pasta sauce, and a package of exactly the same Wurst I’d just fried up for myself. Neither of us, it seems has any imagination. So yesterday we met some friends for dinner and watched the England-Portugal game in Potsdammer Platz on a giant outdoor screen. The Trojan horse is long gone, but now there’s a hundred-foot inflatable Spider-Man climbing one of the buildings.
The game was ridiculous, 1-0 from the third minute until there was only five left on the clock, when the Portuguese scored on a rocket that bounced off the crossbar. Both teams scored with only minutes to play in the second overtime period, forcing a shootout. I should mention at this point that David Beckham is worthless. I’ve seen him play in four matches, with no goals, no assists, and two missed penalty kicks. Leading off for England in the shootout, the most famous athlete in the world missed the goal. The shootout tied at 4-4 (thanks, Becks), and went into two extra innings until the Portuguese goalie made a lucky save for the win. On the upside, I have a new favorite soccer player in the entire world, and English defender named Ashleigh Cole. First off, he’s named Ashleigh, which is pretty awesome if you can pull it off. Second, he absolutely shut down the entire left-hand side of the field. Time and again, Portugal’s flashy young starlet would come dancing down the field, feinting, bobbing, and weaving, his hair immaculate and his ears studded with bling that would make Barry Bonds blush, only to have a steely-eyed Cole kick the ball right out from under him. And when the shootout was tied 4-4 after the five regular kickers and the teams had to go down the rosters for shooters, did Cole score? Yes he did. Take that, Mr. Posh Spice.
Anyway, the little guidebook that my mom has says in the introduction that “Travel makes it impossible to be ethnocentric.” This is nonsense. If anything, absence makes the heart grow fonder. I’ve taken to saying ‘howdy’ and ‘y’all,’ just because I’m an American, dammit. I watch world-class soccer every day, but a little part of me is grousing about how much more boring it is than basketball. If I had a cowboy hat, I think I’d wear it, silly as that would look with shorts and sandals. Maybe it’s because the language is so confounding, or maybe it’s just that I haven’t had a decent burrito in four months, but I feel much more American here than I ever did at home, in actual America. So I’m still having a good time, especially since the quarter is over, but I’m really looking forwards to getting back home. Plus our place in suites next fall will be awesome, I’ll get to take water polo again, and all my classes will be in that most beautiful of modes of human communication, ye olde English language.
If any of you will be in Germany between now and the end of August, or in San Diego in September before school, give a holler, and otherwise I’ll see you back on campus. And let me know how your summer’s going – I love to get mail that I can actually read.
Sunday, May 09, 2004
Third Letter from Berlin
When we last spoke I was headed outbound to Munich in Bavaria. Bavaria is, I’m told, the Texas of Germany, in that it’s southern and distinctive and conservative and has an ongoing rivalry with the rest of the nation. It is also the home of FC Bayern München, the Yankees of German soccer. They’re easily the richest, most talented, and most evil sports franchise in the country. Their golaie, Oliver Kaan, is a hairy beast of a man who helped them beat the US team in the last World Cup. They play at the stadium built for the Munich Olympics, and when we visited it we got to tool around in their locker room. We’ll find out in the coming weeks if my Voodoo has gotten any better since I came overseas.
We did a bunch of touristy stuff, visitng medieval churches and the Deutsches Museum, tooling around in the central park and centuries-old biergartens. We even visited an old Roman-style bath, and its nine different spas. Somewhat awkwardly, at least at first, bathing suits were not allowed. We’re all much closer now. The whole trip was on Helen Bing’s dime, and we got to eat tons of delicious Bavarian food. This is mostly potatoes, cabbage, and roast animal. And apple strudel. I am especially fond of apple strudel.
All of my classes decided that we had to make up the class time lost during the Munich trip, and were unreceptive that this should have been built into the original schedule months ago. Its not like it was a surprise weekend getaway. So this week was full of work, and I’m glad to finally have it behind me. Midway through the week I became frustrated with what an aesthetic and logical catastrophe the German language is, but then I read Twain’s “The Awful German Language” and felt better. He told me I was right. I heartily recommend the essay – it’s certainly better than trying to work out these blasted adjective endings.
For one of my classes we read a newspaper interview with an old German politician who’s been living in Germany. He said that his main feeling of the German Zeitgeist (literally: time-ghost) is listlessness. I am inclined to agree. I haven’t yet met a native German who seemed to have a sense of purpose or direction. Maybe that’s just because I’m comparing Freie Univserity students who are approaching their third decade with hard-chargers like Mike, but maybe not. Apparently the Germans were the lazy dreamers of Eurpoe until the late nineteenth century, so maybe the whole efficiency/punctuality/fussiness/world war thing was just a hundred year itch. Time, as always, will tell.
So last week I’ve had it up to here with evertyhing German, so I decided to spend a night down in Potsdammer Platz. Back in the day the Berlin Wall ran right through it, and now that we’ve taken it back from those pesky Ruskies we’ve turned it into a gleaming monument to American-style Capitalism. So any way, I went with some friends to a diner. If Vegas wasn’t in America, and there was an America-themed hotel/casino there, this is the kind of restaurant they’d have in the lobby. There was, for example, a giant plastic and neon American flag mounted on the ceiling and a ‘50s Harley bolted to the wall above the bar. We loved the place. It seems like every other country’s citizens would be vaguely offended by tacky and inauthentictakes on their culture. But we’re Americans – we practically invented tacky and inauthentic. It made me homesick. I ate a bacon cheeseburger and went across the street to see Kill Bill 2 in the original English and without subtitles. They have a giant wooden Trojan horse outside the theater, which faces the Sony Center plaza, covered by a glass evocation of Mount Fuji. Tonight some people went down there to see another movie, but the theater was closed because Brad Pitt had to show up to watch his own movie (in the European premiere of Troy). What a jerk.
I’ve found out this whole ‘nightlife’ thing they do here isn’t really my thing. It basically involves wandering around from one noisy, smoke-filled club/bar to another, paying too much to get in and too much for a drink to stand around in music you can’t dance to with people you can’t talk to. Then when you’re tired and want to go home, you ride home for an hour and a half on the subway. So I’m going to try the whole early to bed/rise think this week instead.
We did a bunch of touristy stuff, visitng medieval churches and the Deutsches Museum, tooling around in the central park and centuries-old biergartens. We even visited an old Roman-style bath, and its nine different spas. Somewhat awkwardly, at least at first, bathing suits were not allowed. We’re all much closer now. The whole trip was on Helen Bing’s dime, and we got to eat tons of delicious Bavarian food. This is mostly potatoes, cabbage, and roast animal. And apple strudel. I am especially fond of apple strudel.
All of my classes decided that we had to make up the class time lost during the Munich trip, and were unreceptive that this should have been built into the original schedule months ago. Its not like it was a surprise weekend getaway. So this week was full of work, and I’m glad to finally have it behind me. Midway through the week I became frustrated with what an aesthetic and logical catastrophe the German language is, but then I read Twain’s “The Awful German Language” and felt better. He told me I was right. I heartily recommend the essay – it’s certainly better than trying to work out these blasted adjective endings.
For one of my classes we read a newspaper interview with an old German politician who’s been living in Germany. He said that his main feeling of the German Zeitgeist (literally: time-ghost) is listlessness. I am inclined to agree. I haven’t yet met a native German who seemed to have a sense of purpose or direction. Maybe that’s just because I’m comparing Freie Univserity students who are approaching their third decade with hard-chargers like Mike, but maybe not. Apparently the Germans were the lazy dreamers of Eurpoe until the late nineteenth century, so maybe the whole efficiency/punctuality/fussiness/world war thing was just a hundred year itch. Time, as always, will tell.
So last week I’ve had it up to here with evertyhing German, so I decided to spend a night down in Potsdammer Platz. Back in the day the Berlin Wall ran right through it, and now that we’ve taken it back from those pesky Ruskies we’ve turned it into a gleaming monument to American-style Capitalism. So any way, I went with some friends to a diner. If Vegas wasn’t in America, and there was an America-themed hotel/casino there, this is the kind of restaurant they’d have in the lobby. There was, for example, a giant plastic and neon American flag mounted on the ceiling and a ‘50s Harley bolted to the wall above the bar. We loved the place. It seems like every other country’s citizens would be vaguely offended by tacky and inauthentictakes on their culture. But we’re Americans – we practically invented tacky and inauthentic. It made me homesick. I ate a bacon cheeseburger and went across the street to see Kill Bill 2 in the original English and without subtitles. They have a giant wooden Trojan horse outside the theater, which faces the Sony Center plaza, covered by a glass evocation of Mount Fuji. Tonight some people went down there to see another movie, but the theater was closed because Brad Pitt had to show up to watch his own movie (in the European premiere of Troy). What a jerk.
I’ve found out this whole ‘nightlife’ thing they do here isn’t really my thing. It basically involves wandering around from one noisy, smoke-filled club/bar to another, paying too much to get in and too much for a drink to stand around in music you can’t dance to with people you can’t talk to. Then when you’re tired and want to go home, you ride home for an hour and a half on the subway. So I’m going to try the whole early to bed/rise think this week instead.
Sunday, April 25, 2004
Second Letter from Berlin
The students at Freie University were on break for the first three weeks that we were here, but now their semester has started so there are plenty of German college students about for us to try to chat with. I met a couple of cool kids in my basketball class and I’ve met a water polo coach who’s going to hook me up with a team to play with in the bundes liga when the season starts in May. The other night we met a group of FU students way out in the East side of the city, at this place where you pick up a wine glass for 1 euro, eat and drink whatever you want, and pay what you feel like you owe when you leave. All on the honor system, and the place is still in business. Incredible. I talked for a long time with this one political science student about differing perspectives on world affairs and each other’s cultures, and we both agreed that The Big Lebowski is among the finest pieces of cinema ever produced. I swear, the Germans love that flick. No idea why.
So last summer when I was living on my own away from home for the first time I read a lot of websites and a few irreverent cookbooks promising to teach me, the young bachelor new the kitchen, how not to starve. They all focused on making the actual cooking very simple, which it turns out was a waste of time. Cooking is easy; it’s the shopping that’s hard, especially when we’re cramped for fridge space and the markets are open about 10 hours a week. I am pursuing ever more creative ways of preparing spaghetti, rice, and sausage. Also, I love frozen pizza. For some reason the Germans use salty salami instead of good, honest pepperoni on their pizzas, and I haven’t been able to get a straight answer out of anyone as to why.
Yesterday I saw my first European football (ie soccer) match. The home team went up 3-0 and sat there the rest of the game, so that was exciting, and some fans lit their seats on fire with about five minutes left to play in the game. By the time a fire extinguisher had been passed up from the field, another section was ablaze as well. Luckily, the crowd of 45,000 only filled the Olympic Stadium to about half capacity, so people could easily put some distance between themselves and the burning seats. Other than that the crowd was well-behaved, so the arson was a bit out of the blue.
Wednesday we head out to Munich for a few days on some cultural field trip. I have too much to do before then to look into exactly what we’ll be doing, but rest assured I’ll let you know when I find out.
So last summer when I was living on my own away from home for the first time I read a lot of websites and a few irreverent cookbooks promising to teach me, the young bachelor new the kitchen, how not to starve. They all focused on making the actual cooking very simple, which it turns out was a waste of time. Cooking is easy; it’s the shopping that’s hard, especially when we’re cramped for fridge space and the markets are open about 10 hours a week. I am pursuing ever more creative ways of preparing spaghetti, rice, and sausage. Also, I love frozen pizza. For some reason the Germans use salty salami instead of good, honest pepperoni on their pizzas, and I haven’t been able to get a straight answer out of anyone as to why.
Yesterday I saw my first European football (ie soccer) match. The home team went up 3-0 and sat there the rest of the game, so that was exciting, and some fans lit their seats on fire with about five minutes left to play in the game. By the time a fire extinguisher had been passed up from the field, another section was ablaze as well. Luckily, the crowd of 45,000 only filled the Olympic Stadium to about half capacity, so people could easily put some distance between themselves and the burning seats. Other than that the crowd was well-behaved, so the arson was a bit out of the blue.
Wednesday we head out to Munich for a few days on some cultural field trip. I have too much to do before then to look into exactly what we’ll be doing, but rest assured I’ll let you know when I find out.
Thursday, April 08, 2004
First Letter from Berlin
If you’re receiving this it’s because you’re special and I care about you and what you think, and I’m optimistic or conceited enough to think that you’ll care what I’ve been up to here in Germany. Unfortunately, I don’t have an exhaustive list of such people handy or even access to my usual e-mail address book, so please feel free to kick this along to anyone you think will care, and tell them how I’m doing. I promise to try to make it entertaining. Pictures to illustrate can be found at stanford.edu/~taustin. Right then, without any further ado:
Life in Berlin so far has been very busy, both because there’s a lot of stuff we wind up doing, and because going anywhere requires commuting for usually at least half an hour on the subway, or U-Bahn. At first I was enamored with the public transport system here, since it allows a pedestrian with a monthly pass to easily travel freely throughout the city, but I’ve grown increasingly ambivalent about it. The trains run predictably on schedule, but that schedule stops shortly after midnight, and many evenings seem to end with a hurried rush to the nearest station to avoid being stranded at one in the morning in front of some Soviet-Bloc apartment building. If you were the paper-writing type you could talk at length about the automobile as a metaphor for self-determination, but I’m not so I’ll just simply say that sometimes it’s a pain to have one’s location be at the whim of some unfeeling metropolitan transit authority. Lots of interesting-looking people ride the U-Bahn, but apparently talking to another human being on the trains violates some ancient code of German subway ridership, and is heavily frowned upon. Perhaps in merely trying I have already brought great dishonor to my ancestors. Sometimes you never know. Some students at the center met an aspiring model/actress/pop star on the subway who handed them glossy promotional materials, and now you see giant posters for her upcoming concert and her face at newsstands on the cover of German Maxims.
Usually we get along fine with a mixture of English and pre-schooler German, but there are always little things to reminding you this is a foreign and sometimes very strange country. I had a girl about my age ask me something about the train schedule the other day on the platform and she’d got through three or four sentences of what must have been a complicated question before I remembered how to say I didn’t know anything about anything in German. Earlier that evening we went out to a bar with sand on the floor like a beach where you can order beer from Ghana that’s served in a plastic coconut half. I saw a kid there with his friends drinking Smirnoff Ice out of a straw. A lot of the teenagers look like they’ve read about Berkeley in a book and are trying just a bit too hard to look like they’re from there.
I wind up spending most of my time at the Stanford center here on the outskirts of the city, since I have to be here for classes or to use their kitchen, and it takes a while to get anyplace else. It’s also where I can connect to the internet and read e-mail, so naturally I’m there right now. The center is a historic villa that’s been remodeled inside to give it a set-of-this-season’s-The-Real-World feel. I sleep at my home stay—a room in a kindly old woman’s apartment. Frau Lafferenz lives on the fifth floor of the building with two Siamese cats; one who leapt into my suitcase like he owned it while I was still unpacking, and one who still runs, terrified, under the furniture when I walk into a room. She does my laundry and doesn’t mind if I come home late (or like Tuesday, when I was at the center until four writing a paper, not at all) so it’s okay if the shower is a little short or there’s no elevator. Between the nine-hour time difference, extended travel, and irregular work habits, my internal sleeping clock is completely haywire, but I seem to be finding my stride at last.
The hardest class I’m taking is one on German sports culture. It’s taught entirely in German, and requires weekly two-page papers (also in German) analyzing a sporting event we’re gone to see as a class. We’ve watched the Berlin Eisbären (or Polar Bears, a hockey team) kick the snot out of the team from Ingolstadt 5-0 in the semifinals of the playoffs. We also saw the local Alba Berlin pro basketball team (last years national champions and currently ranked number 1) lose badly a team from Frankfurt in what looked like a badly-coached college game. They even had a Dollie-esque Alba Dance Team instead of traditional cheerleaders and a short game played by area children at halftime, just like back home at Maples. We have to take a sports class at the local Freie University as part of the course, and though I was disappointed water polo isn’t offered this quarter, I’ve been inspired by the pros’ awful play to take basketball. That doesn’t start for a few weeks, but I’ll let you know how it goes.
In addition to that and some language classes I’m taking a course on Globalization that will take us to a conference with a bunch of other Stanford overseas students at the end of the quarter. There’s an architecture and art history professor who takes us on fabulous walking tours of the city and explains the historical, intellectual, and aesthetic significance of what we see. One of the students here has said of him, “I’m pretty sure that he’s just God and knows everything.” Yesterday we toured the Charlottenburg castle and he could tell us all about what the shape of the gardens means, why the walls were painted a certain color, and what the furniture can tell you about the books Frederick the great liked to read. If I could take Berlin von Ort every day for fifteen minutes, I would in a heartbeat.
I’m pretty sure I’ve got a job over the summer working on a computational linguistics project in the University of Potsdam. That’s only a short ways from here and I’d be living in a college town, so I’d have a chance to spend more time with German college students and hopefully learn a bit more language. I’m going back down there next Friday to take a look at what they’re doing and finalize things with the professor, but they seem to really want me there.
Tomorrow morning we’re going to head off to Prague for a four-day weekend. It’s supposed to be an amazing city, and round-trip train fare was only 75 Euros. I’ve been pretty bad about taking pictures of things, but I’m going to work on that. Happy birthday Jason, and good luck to Dylan, and y’all let me know what’s going on stateside from time to time. So that’s it for now, and Tschüss until next time.
Life in Berlin so far has been very busy, both because there’s a lot of stuff we wind up doing, and because going anywhere requires commuting for usually at least half an hour on the subway, or U-Bahn. At first I was enamored with the public transport system here, since it allows a pedestrian with a monthly pass to easily travel freely throughout the city, but I’ve grown increasingly ambivalent about it. The trains run predictably on schedule, but that schedule stops shortly after midnight, and many evenings seem to end with a hurried rush to the nearest station to avoid being stranded at one in the morning in front of some Soviet-Bloc apartment building. If you were the paper-writing type you could talk at length about the automobile as a metaphor for self-determination, but I’m not so I’ll just simply say that sometimes it’s a pain to have one’s location be at the whim of some unfeeling metropolitan transit authority. Lots of interesting-looking people ride the U-Bahn, but apparently talking to another human being on the trains violates some ancient code of German subway ridership, and is heavily frowned upon. Perhaps in merely trying I have already brought great dishonor to my ancestors. Sometimes you never know. Some students at the center met an aspiring model/actress/pop star on the subway who handed them glossy promotional materials, and now you see giant posters for her upcoming concert and her face at newsstands on the cover of German Maxims.
Usually we get along fine with a mixture of English and pre-schooler German, but there are always little things to reminding you this is a foreign and sometimes very strange country. I had a girl about my age ask me something about the train schedule the other day on the platform and she’d got through three or four sentences of what must have been a complicated question before I remembered how to say I didn’t know anything about anything in German. Earlier that evening we went out to a bar with sand on the floor like a beach where you can order beer from Ghana that’s served in a plastic coconut half. I saw a kid there with his friends drinking Smirnoff Ice out of a straw. A lot of the teenagers look like they’ve read about Berkeley in a book and are trying just a bit too hard to look like they’re from there.
I wind up spending most of my time at the Stanford center here on the outskirts of the city, since I have to be here for classes or to use their kitchen, and it takes a while to get anyplace else. It’s also where I can connect to the internet and read e-mail, so naturally I’m there right now. The center is a historic villa that’s been remodeled inside to give it a set-of-this-season’s-The-Real-World feel. I sleep at my home stay—a room in a kindly old woman’s apartment. Frau Lafferenz lives on the fifth floor of the building with two Siamese cats; one who leapt into my suitcase like he owned it while I was still unpacking, and one who still runs, terrified, under the furniture when I walk into a room. She does my laundry and doesn’t mind if I come home late (or like Tuesday, when I was at the center until four writing a paper, not at all) so it’s okay if the shower is a little short or there’s no elevator. Between the nine-hour time difference, extended travel, and irregular work habits, my internal sleeping clock is completely haywire, but I seem to be finding my stride at last.
The hardest class I’m taking is one on German sports culture. It’s taught entirely in German, and requires weekly two-page papers (also in German) analyzing a sporting event we’re gone to see as a class. We’ve watched the Berlin Eisbären (or Polar Bears, a hockey team) kick the snot out of the team from Ingolstadt 5-0 in the semifinals of the playoffs. We also saw the local Alba Berlin pro basketball team (last years national champions and currently ranked number 1) lose badly a team from Frankfurt in what looked like a badly-coached college game. They even had a Dollie-esque Alba Dance Team instead of traditional cheerleaders and a short game played by area children at halftime, just like back home at Maples. We have to take a sports class at the local Freie University as part of the course, and though I was disappointed water polo isn’t offered this quarter, I’ve been inspired by the pros’ awful play to take basketball. That doesn’t start for a few weeks, but I’ll let you know how it goes.
In addition to that and some language classes I’m taking a course on Globalization that will take us to a conference with a bunch of other Stanford overseas students at the end of the quarter. There’s an architecture and art history professor who takes us on fabulous walking tours of the city and explains the historical, intellectual, and aesthetic significance of what we see. One of the students here has said of him, “I’m pretty sure that he’s just God and knows everything.” Yesterday we toured the Charlottenburg castle and he could tell us all about what the shape of the gardens means, why the walls were painted a certain color, and what the furniture can tell you about the books Frederick the great liked to read. If I could take Berlin von Ort every day for fifteen minutes, I would in a heartbeat.
I’m pretty sure I’ve got a job over the summer working on a computational linguistics project in the University of Potsdam. That’s only a short ways from here and I’d be living in a college town, so I’d have a chance to spend more time with German college students and hopefully learn a bit more language. I’m going back down there next Friday to take a look at what they’re doing and finalize things with the professor, but they seem to really want me there.
Tomorrow morning we’re going to head off to Prague for a four-day weekend. It’s supposed to be an amazing city, and round-trip train fare was only 75 Euros. I’ve been pretty bad about taking pictures of things, but I’m going to work on that. Happy birthday Jason, and good luck to Dylan, and y’all let me know what’s going on stateside from time to time. So that’s it for now, and Tschüss until next time.
Friday, April 02, 2004
About the Author
Trevor is an engineer for Palantir Technologies in New York City. Previously, he co-founded an internet startup called Udorse and worked at a hedge fund called Clarium Capital Management. He is not a football player or metal detecting enthusiast. Those are other Trevor Austins.
Thursday, April 01, 2004
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